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ESSAYS 



"The Critic 



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BY 



IN BURROUGHS 

EDMUND C. STEDMAN 
WALT WHITMAN 

R. H. STODDARD 

F. B. SANBORN 

E. W. GOSSE 

AND OTHERS 




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BOSTON 

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY 

1882 



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Copyright, 1881 and 1882, 
By J. L. & J. B. GILDER. 



jFranklt'n ^ress: 

RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 
BOSTON. 



The essays and sketches of which this volume 
is composed are taken, as the name implies, from 
" The Critic." In the conviction that some, if 
not all of them, are, despite their brevity, of per- 
manent literary value, it has been deemed well 
to reproduce them in a form more durable than 
that of a fortnightly review. This step is ren- 
dered doubly advisable by the fact that some of 
the earlier numbers of ' ' The Critic ' ' are already 
out of print. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Thoeeau's Wildness. John Burroughs . . 9 
II. William Blake, Poet and Paintee. 

Edmund C Stedman 21 

HI. Death of Caelyle. Walt WJiitman. ... 31 

IV. Death of Longfellow. Walt WJiitman . . 41 
Y. Geoege Eliot and the Novel. Edward 

Eggleston 49 

• VI. Feances Hodgson Buenett. R. H. Stoddard, 57 
VII. Thoeeau's Unpublished Poetey. F. B. 

Sanborn 71 

VIII. Emeeson and the Supeelative. John Bur- 
roughs 81 

IX. A Company of Speing Poets. Edith 31. 

TJwmas 91 

• X. Natuee in Liteeatuee. John Burroughs . 103 

XI. Austin Dobson. E. W. Gosse 109 

XII. Alphonse Daudet. P. 31. Potter 121 

XIII. The Boston Culture. J. H. Morse .... 133 

XIV. The Late Sidney Laniee. E. C. Stedman . 141 
XV. English Society and Endymion. Julia Ward 

Howe 153 

XVI. Histoeical Criticism of Cheist. H. W. 

Belloics 165 

XVII. Whitman's Leaves of Geass 175 

5 



I. 

THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 



Essays from "The Critic." 



THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 



Doubtless the wildest man New England 
has turned out since the red aborigines va- 
cated her territory was Henry Thoreau, — a 
man in whom the Indian re-appeared on the 
plane of taste and morals. One is tempted 
to apply to him his own lines on "Elisha 
Dugan," as it is very certain they fit himself 
much more closely than they ever did his 
neighbor : — 

" O man of wild habits, 

Partridges and rabbits, 

Who hast no cares 

Only to set snares, 



10 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Who liv'st all alone 
Close to the bone, 
And where life is sweetest 
Constantly eatest." 

His whole life was a search for the wild, 
not only in nature, but in literature, in life, 
in morals. The shyest and most elusive 
thoughts and impressions were the ones 
that fascinated him most, not only in his 
own mind, but in the minds of others. His 
startling paradoxes are only one form his 
wildness took. He cared little for science, 
except as it escaped the rules and technicali- 
ties, and put him on the trail of the ideal, 
the transcendental. Thoreau was of French 
extraction ; and every drop of his blood seems 
to have turned toward the aboriginal, as the 
French blood has so often done in other ways 
in this country. He, for the most part, de- 
spised the white man; but his enthusiasm 
kindled at the mention of the Indian. He 
envied the Indian ; he coveted his knowl- 



THOREAU'8 WILDNESS. 11 

edge, his arts, his wood-craft. He accred- 
ited him with a more " practical and vital 
science " than was contained in the books. 
" The Indian stood nearer to wild Nature 
than we." "It was a new light when my 
guide gave me Indian names for things for 
which I had only scientific ones before. In 
proportion as I understood the language, I 
saw them from a new point of view." And 
again : " The Indian's earthly life was as far 
off from us as heaven is." In his " Week," 
he complains that our poetry is only white 
man's poetry. " If we could listen but for 
an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, 
we should understand why he will not 
exchange his savageness for civilization." 
Speaking of himself, he says, " I am con- 
vinced that my genius dates from an older 
era than the agricultural. I would at least 
strike my spade into the earth with such 
careless freedom, but accuracy, as the wood- 
pecker his bill into a tree. There is in my 



12 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward 
all wildness." Again and again he returns 
to the Indian : " We talk of civilizing the 
Indian, but that is not the name for his im- 
provement. By the wary independence and 
aloofness of his dim forest life he preserves 
his intercourse with his native gods, and is 
admitted from time to time to a rare and 
peculiar society with Nature. He has glances 
of starry recognition, to which our saloons 
are strangers. The steady illumination of 
his genius, dim only because distant, is like 
the faint but satisfying light of the stars 
compared with the dazzling but ineffectual 
and short-lived blaze of candles." " We 
would not always be soothing and taming 
nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but 
sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the 
buffalo." The only relics that interest him 
are Indian relics. One of his regular spring 
recreations or occupations is the hunting of 
arrow-heads. He goes looking for arrow- 



THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 13 

heads as other people go berrying or bota- 
nizing. In his journal, parts of which have 
recently been published, under the title of 
" Early Spring in Massachusetts," he makes 
a long entry under date of March 28, 1859, 
about his pursuit of arrow-heads. " I spend 
many hours every spring," he says, "gather- 
ing the crop which the melting snow and 
rain have washed bare. When, at length, 
some island in the meadow or some sandy 
field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps 
for rye, in the fall, I take note of it, and do 
not fail to repair thither as soon as the earth 
begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot 
chances never to have been cultivated before, 
I am the first to gather a crop from it. The 
farmer little thinks that another reaps a har- 
vest which is the fruit of his toil." "As 
the dragon's teeth bore a crop of soldiers, so 
these [arrow-heads] bear crops of philoso- 
phers and poets, and the same seed is just as 
good to plant again. It is a stone fruit. 



14 ESSAYS FROM TT1E CRITIC. 

Each one yields roe a thought. I come 
nearer to the maker of it than if I found 
his bones." He probably picked up thou- 
sands of arrow-heads. He had an eye for 
them. The Indian in him recognized its 
own. 

His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical 
of the wild weapon he so loved, — hard, 
flinty, fine-graiued, penetrating, winged, — a 
flying shaft, bringing down its game with 
marvellous sureness. His literary art was 
to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration ; 
and though his arrows sometimes go wide, 
yet it is always a pleasure to watch their 
aerial course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind 
of Emersonian or transcendental red man, 
going about with a pocket-glass and an her- 
barium, instead of with a bow and toma- 
hawk. He appears to have been as stoical 
and indifferent and unsympathetic as a veri- 
table Indian ; and how he hunted without 
trap or gun, and fished without hook or 



THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 15 

snare ! Everywhere the wild drew him. He 
liked the telegraph, because it was a kind of 
seolian harp ; the wind blowing upon it made 
wild, sweet music. He liked the railroad 
through his native town, because it was the 
wildest road he knew of : it only made deep 
cuts into and through the hills. " On it are 
no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on 
it does not disturb me. The woods are left 
to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild 
in its accompaniments, keeping all its raw 
edges. Even the laborers on it are not like 
other laborers." One day he passed a little 
boy in the street who had on a home-made 
cap of a woodchuck's skin, and it completely 
filled his eye. He makes a delightful note 
about it in his journal. That was the kind 
of cap to have, — "a perfect little Idyl, as 
they say." Any wild trait unexpectedly 
cropping out in any of the domestic animals 
pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was 
liis favorite apple, because of its beauty and 



16 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a 
wild horse, but such an exploit was in keep- 
ing with his genius. 

Thoreau hesitated to call himself a natu- 
ralist. That was too tame : he would per- 
haps have been content to have been an 
Indian naturalist. He says in this journal, 
and with much truth and force, " Man cannot 
afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature 
directly, but only with the side of his eye. 
He must look through and beyond her. To 
look at her is as fatal as to look at the head 
of Medusa. It turns the man of science to 
stone." When he was applied to by the 
secretary of the Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, at Washington, for informa- 
tion as to the particular branch of science he 
was most interested in, he confesses he was 
ashamed to answer for fear of exciting ridi- 
cule. But he says, "If it had been the 
secretary of an association of which Plato or 
Aristotle was the president, I should not 



THOREAU'S WILDNESS. 17 

have hesitated to describe my studies at 
ODce and particularly." " The fact is, I am 
a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural 
philosopher to boot." Indeed, what Thoreau 
was finally after in nature was something 
ulterior to science, something ulterior to 
poetry, something ulterior to philosophy; it 
was that vague something which he calls 
44 the higher law," and which eludes all 
direct statement. He went to Nature as to 
an oracle ; and though he sometimes, indeed 
very often, questioned her as a naturalist 
and a poet, yet there was always another 
question in his mind. He ransacked the 
country about Concord in all seasons and 
weathers, and at all times of the day and 
night ; he delved into the ground, he probed 
the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug 
into woodchuck holes, into muskrats' dens, 
into the retreats of the mice and squirrels ; 
he saw every bird, heard every sound, found 
every wild-flower, and brought home many a 



18 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 

fresh bit of natural history ; but he was 
always searching for something he did not 
find. This search of his for the transcen- 
dental, the unfindable, the wild that will not 
be caught, he has set forth in a beautiful 
parable in " Walden : " — 

" I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and 
a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. 
Many are the travellers I have spoken con- 
cerning them, describing their tracks, and 
what calls they answered to. I have met 
one or two who had heard the hound, and 
the tramp of the horse, and even seen the 
dove disappear behind a cloud; and they 
seemed as anxious to recover them as if they 
had lost them themselves." 

JOHN BURROUGHS. 



II. 



WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 



WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 21 



II. 

WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 

If Blake was not a great master, he had in 
him certain elements that go to the making 
of one. Often these were beyond his own 
control. One does not need to be a painter 
or a poet to see, in his extraordinary work, 
that he frequently was the servant rather 
than the master; that he was swept away, 
like his own Elijah, by the horses and chariot 
of fire, and that when, like Paul, he reached 
the third heaven, whether he was in the 
body or out of it he could not tell. This 
was not so at all times. The conception and 
execution of his " Job " are massive, pow- 
erful, sublime, maintained throughout the 
series. " The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" 



22 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 

is a wonderful, a fearlessly imaginative, pro- 
duction. But much of his labor with pen 
or pencil does not show that union of genius 
with method which declares the master. He 
does not always sit above the thunder: he 
is enrapt, whirled, trembling in the electric 
vortex of a cloud. 

What is this, you say, but to be the more 
inspired ? True, no man ever lived who had, 
at intervals, a more absolute revelation. He 
was obedient to the heavenly vision; but 
great masters, obeying it, find it in harmony 
with their own will and occasion. They 
have, moreover, the power to discern be- 
tween false and foolish prophecies, — be- 
tween the monitions from a deity, and those 
from the limbo of dreams, delusions, and 
bewildered souls. 

Did Blake see the apparitions he claimed 
to see? Did the heads of Edward and 
Wallace, and the Man that built the Pyra- 
mids, rise at his bidding, like the phantoms 



WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 23 

summoned for Macbeth? I have no doubt 
of it. Neither, I think, will painters doubt 
it; for I suspect that they also have such 
visions, — they who are born with the sense 
that makes visible to the inward eye the 
aspect of forms and faces which they have 
imagined or composed, and with the faculty 
that retains them until the art of reproduc- 
tion has done its service. We, who are not 
painters, at times see visions with our 
clouded eyes, — one face swiftly blotting 
out another, as if in mockery at our power- 
lessness to capture and depict them. 

Men like Swedenborg and Blake, sensitive 
in every fibre and exalted by mysticism, ac- 
cept as direct revelation the visions which 
other leaders understand to be the concep- 
tions of their own faculty, and utilize in the 
practice of their art. 

One of Blake's masterly elements was 
individuality. His drawings are so original 
as to startle us: they seem like pictures 



24 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

from some new-discovered world, and require 
time for our just appreciation of their unique 
beauty, weirdness, and power. 

Another element was faith, — unbounded 
faith in his religion, his mission, and the way 
revealed to him. To say that he had faith 
is to say also that he believed in himself; 
for his ecstatic piety and reverence and his 
most glorious visions were the unconscious 
effluence of his own nature. And that a 
poet or an artist should have faith is most 
vital and essential. He cannot be a mere 
agnostic. The leaders have had various 
beliefs, but each has held fast to his own. 
Take the lowest grade of Shakespeare's con- 
victions: he believed in royalty and the 
divine right of kings. His kings, then, are 
chiefs indeed, hedged with divinity, and 
speaking in the kingliest diction of any 
language or time. If I were asked to name 
the most grievous thing in modern art, I 
should say it is the lack of some kind of 



WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 25 

faith. Doubt, distrust, the question "What 
is the use ? " make dim the canvas, and bur- 
den many a lyre. The new faith looks to 
science and the reign of law. Very well : 
these must breed its inspiration, as in time 
they will. But the processes of reason are 
slower than the childish instincts of an early 
and poetic age. 

Blake had the true gift of expression : he 
was not merely learned, but inventive, in 
his methods of drawing, etching, and color. 
Here, and in his talks concerning art, he 
showed power and wisdom enough to equip 
a host of ordinary draughtsmen. He was 
mad, only in the sense that gave the clown 
warrant for saying all Englishmen are mad ; 
only when he left the field in which he was 
thoroughly grounded, for speculations in 
which he was self-trained and half-trained. 
It is useless, however, to wonder what such 
an one might have been: he was what he 
was, and as great as he could be. There is 



26 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 

no gainsaying his marvellous and instant 
imagination. He saw not the sunrise, but 
an innumerable company of the angelic host, 
crying, " Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God 
Almighty ! " Heaven and Hell are spirits, 
alike naked and alike clothed with beauty, 
rushing together in eternal love. Job and 
his friends are almost pre-Adamite in mould 
and visage. His daughters are indeed they 
of whom we are told that there were not 
found others so fair in all the land. Jehovah 
himself came within Blake's vision : the 
dreamer walked not only with sages and 
archangels and Titans, but with the very 
God. 

Among his other qualities were a surpris- 
ingly delicate fancy, human tenderness and 
pity, industry and fertility in the extreme. 
He had ideas of right and government, and 
was grandly impatient of dulness and of 
hypocrisy in life or method. Finally, even 
his faults, and the grotesqueness which re- 



WILLIAM BLAKE, POET AND PAINTER. 27 

peatedly brings his mark below the highest, 
add to the fascination that attends the re- 
vival and study of this artist. All that I 
say of his drawings applies in many respects 
to his rhymed and unrhymed verse. But his 
special gift was the draughtsman's. It 
would not be correct to say that he often 
hesitated with the pen but never with the 
pencil ; since, whether as an artist or as a 
maker of songs and " prophetic books," his 
product was bold and unstinted: but his 
grotesque errors are found more frequently 
in his poetry than in his designs, while his 
most original and exquisite range of verse 
is far below that attained by him in his 
works of outline and color. 

These are the merest, the most fragment- 
ary impressions of a man whom some have 
dismissed with a phrase, terming him a sub- 
lime madman, and concerning whom others 
— poets and critics of a subtle and poetic 
type — have written essay upon essay, or 



28 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

deemed whole volumes too brief for their 
glowing studies of his genius. If he did 
not found a school, it may almost be said 
that a modern school has founded itself upon 
the new understanding of his modes and 
purpose. But in copying the external quali- 
ties of Blake, it does not follow that his 
self-elected pupils are animated by his genius, 
rapture, and undaunted faith. 

EDMUND C. STEDMAN. 



III. 



DEATH OF CARLYLE. 



\ 



DEATH OF CARLYLE. 31 



m. 

DEATH OF CARLYLE. 

And so the flame of the lamp, after long 
wasting and flickering, has gone out entirely. 

As a representative author, a literary fig- 
ure, no man else will bequeath to the future 
more significant hints of our stormy era, its 
fierce paradoxes, its din, and its struggling 
parturition periods, than Carlyle. He be- 
longs to our own branch of the stock too, — 
neither Latin nor Greek, but altogether 
Gothic. Rugged, mountainous, volcanic, he 
was himself more a French Revolution than 
any of his volumes. 

In some respects, so far in the nineteenth 
century, the best-equipt, keenest mind, even 
from the college point of view, of all Brit- 



32 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

ain ; only lie had an ailing body. Dyspep- 
sia is to be traced in every page, and now 
and then fills the page. One may include 
among the lessons of his life, — even though 
that life stretched to amazing length, — how 
behind the tally of genius and morals stands 
the stomach, and gives a sort of casting 
vote. 

Two conflicting agonistic elements seem 
to have contended in the man, sometimes 
pulling him different ways, like wild horses. 
He was a cautious, conservative Scotchman, 
fully aware what a foetid gas-bag much of 
modern radicalism is; but then his great 
heart . demanded reform, demanded change, 
— an always sympathetic, always human 
heart, often terribly at odds with his scorn- 
ful brain. 

No author ever put so much wailing and 
despair into his books, sometimes palpable, 
oftener latent. He reminds me of that pas- 
sage in Young's poems, where, as Death 



DEATH OF CARLYLE. 33 

presses closer and closer for his prey, the 
Soul rushes hither and thither, appealing, 
shrieking, berating, to escape the general 
doom. 

Of shortcomings, even positive blur-spots, 
from an American point of view, he had 
serious share ; but this is no time for speci- 
fying them. When we think how great 
changes never go by jumps in any depart- 
ment of our universe, but that long prep- 
arations, processes, awakenings, are indis- 
pensable, Carlyle was the most serviceable 
democrat of the age. 

How he splashes like leviathan in the seas 
of modern literature and politics ! Doubt- 
less, respecting the latter, one needs first to 
realize, from actual observation, the squalor, 
vice, and doggedness ingrained in the bulk- 
population of the British Islands, with the 
red-tape, the fatuity, the flunkyism every- 
where, to understand the last meaning in his 



34 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 

Accordingly, though he was no chartist or 
radical, I consider Carlyle's by far the most 
indignant comment or protest anent the 
fruits of feudalism to-day in Great Britain, 
— the increasing poverty and degradation of 
the homeless, landless twenty millions, while 
a few thousands, or rather a few hundreds, 
possess the entire soil, the money, and the 
fat berths. Trade and shipping, and clubs 
and culture, and prestige, and guns, and a 
fine select class of gentry and aristocracy, 
with every modern improvement, cannot 
begin to salve or defend such stupendous 
hoggishness. 

For the last three years we in America 
have had transmitted glimpses of Carlyle's 
prostration and bodily decay, — pictures of 
a thin-bodied, lonesome, wifeless, childless, 
very old man, lying on a sofa, kept out of 
bed by indomitable will, but of late never 
well enough to take the open air. News of 
this sort was brought us last fall by the sick 



DEATH OF CARLYLE. 35 

man's neighbor, Moncure Conway; and I 
have noted it from time to time in brief 
descriptions in the papers. A week ago I 
read such an item just before I started out 
for my customary evening stroll between 
eight and nine. 

In the fine, cold night, unusually clear 
(Feb. 5, '81), as I walked some open 
grounds adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, 
and his approaching — perhaps even then 
actual — death, filled me with thoughts, 
eluding statement, and curiously blending 
with the scene. The planet Venus, an hour 
high in the west, with all her volume and 
lustre recovered (she has been shorn and 
languid for nearly a year), including an 
additional sentiment I never noticed before 
— not merely voluptuous, Paphian, steeping, 
fascinating — now with calm, commanding, 
dazzling seriousness and hauteur — the Milo 
Venus now. Upward to the zenith, Jupiter, 
Saturn, and the moon past her quarter, trail- 



36 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

ing in procession, with the Pleiades follow- 
ing, and the constellation Taurus, and red 
Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion 
strode through the south-east, with his glit- 
tering belt ; and a trifle below hung the sun 
of the night, Sirius. Every star dilated, 
more vitreous, nearer than usual. Not as in 
some clear nights when the larger stars 
entirely outshine the rest. Every little star 
or cluster just as distinctly visible, and just 
as nigh. Berenice's Hair showing every 
gem, and new ones. To the north-east and 
north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids, Cassi- 
opeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dip- 
pers. 

While through the whole of this silent 
indescribable show, enclosing and bathing 
my whole receptivity, ran the thought of 
Carlyle dying. (To soothe and spiritualize 
and, as far as may be, solve the mysteries of 
death and genius, consider them under the 
stars at midnight.) 



DEATH OF CARLYLE. 37 

And now that he has gone hence, can it 
be that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically 
dissolve in ashes and by winds, remains an 
identity still? In ways perhaps eluding all 
the statements, lore, and speculations of ten 
thousand years, — eluding all possible state- 
ments to mortal sense, — does he yet exist, a 
definite, vital being, a spirit, an individual, — 
perhaps now wafted in space among those 
stellar sytems, which, suggestive and limit- 
less as they are, merely edge more limitless, 
far more suggestive systems ? 

I have no doubt of it. In silence, of a fine 
night, such questions are answered to the 
soul, the best answers that can be given. 
With me too, when depressed by some spe- 
cially sad event, or tearing problem, I wait 
till I go out under the stars for the last 
voiceless satisfaction. 

WALT WHITMAN. 



IV. 



DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 
/ 



DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 41 



IV. 

DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 

I have just returned from a couple of 
weeks down in some primitive woods where 
I love to go occasionally away from parlors, 
pavements, and the newspapers and maga- 
zines ; and where, of a clear forenoon, deep 
in the shade of pines and cedars, and a tan- 
gle of old laurel-trees and vines, the news of 
Longfellow's death first reached me. For 
want of any thing better, let me lightly 
twine a sprig of the sweet ground-ivy, trail- 
ing so plentifully through the dead leaves at 
my feet, with reflections of that half-hour 
alone, there in the silence, the mottled light, 
'mid those earth-smells of the Jersey woods 
in spring, and lay it as my contribution on 
the dead bard's grave. 



42 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Longfellow in his voluminous works seems 
to me not only to be eminent in the style 
and forms of poetical expression that mark 
the present age (an idiocrasy, almost a sick- 
ness, of verbal melody), but to bring what 
is always dearest as poetry to the general 
human heart and taste, and probably must be 
so in the nature of things. He is certainly 
the sort of bard and counteractant most 
needed for our materialistic, self-assertive, 
money-worshipping, Anglo-Saxon races, and 
especially for the present age in America, — 
an age tyrannically regulated with refer- 
ence to the manufacturer, the merchant, the 
financier, the politician, and the day work- 
man ; for whom and among whom he comes 
as the poet of melody, courtesy, deference, — 
poet of the mellow twilight of the past in 
Italy, Germany, Spain, and in Northern 
Europe, poet of all sympathetic gentleness, 
and universal poet of women and young 
people. I should have to think long if I 



DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 43 

were asked to name the man who has done 
more, and in more valuable directions, for 
America. 

I doubt if there ever was before such a 
fine intuitive judge and selecter of poems. 
His translations of many German and Scan- 
dinavian pieces are said to be better than 
the vernaculars. He does not urge or lash. 
His influence is like good drink or air. He 
is not tepid either, but always vital, with 
flavor, motion, grace. He strikes a splendid 
average, and does not sing exceptional pas- 
sions, or humanity's jagged escapades. He 
is not revolutionary, brings nothing offensive 
or new, does not deal hard blows. On the 
contrary, his songs soothe and heal, or, if 
they excite, it is a -healthy and agreeable 
excitement. His very anger is gentle, is 
at second hand (as in " The Quadroon Girl," 
and "The Witnesses"). 

There is no undue element of pensiveness 
in Longfellow's strains. Even in the early 



44 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

translations, the " Manrique," the movement 
is as of strong and steady wind or tide hold- 
ing up and buoying. Death is not avoided 
through his many themes ; but there is some- 
thing almost winning in his original verses 
and renderings on that dread subject — as, 
closing " The Happiest Land " dispute, — 

" And then the landlord's daughter 
Up to heaven raised her hand, 
And said, « Ye may no more contend,— 
There lies the happiest land 1 ' " 

To the ungracious complaint-charge (as 
by Margaret Fuller many years ago, and 
several times since), of his want of racy 
nativity and special originality, I shall only 
say that America and the world may well be 
reverently thankful — can never be thankful 
enough — for any such singing-bird vouch- 
safed out of the centuries, without asking 
that the notes be different from those of 
other songsters; adding what I have heard 



DEATH OF LONGFELLOW. 45 

Longfellow himself say, that ere the New 
World can be worthily original, and an- 
nounce herself and her own heroes, she must 
be well saturated with the originality of 
others, and respectfully consider the heroes 
that lived before Agamemnon. 

Without jealousies, without mean pas- 
sions, never did the personality, character, 
daily and yearly life of a poet, more steadily 
and truly assimilate his own loving, cultured, 
guileless, courteous ideal, and exemplify it. 
In the world's arena he had some special 
sorrows ; but he had prizes, triumphs, rec- 
ognitions, the grandest. 

Extensive and heartfelt as is to-day, and 
has been for a long while, the fame of Long- 
fellow, it is probable, nay certain, that years 
hence it will be wider and deeper. 

WALT WHITMAN. 

Camden, N. J., April 3, '82. 



V. 
GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 



GEORGE ELIOT AND TEE NOVEL. 49 



GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 

Every writer of the first rank makes 
some modification in his genre. The modern 
French comedy was created by Moliere ; the 
English drama changed its form and aims 
in the hands of Shakespeare ; the French 
stage was turned upside down by the ap- 
pearance of "Hernani." A like change, I 
take it, far-reaching in its effect, has begun 
to take place in the modern novel since the 
" Scenes of Clerical Life " and " Adam 
Bede " appeared to a public still enamoured 
of the historical romances of Walter Scott. 
I know that some of our ablest critics have 
thought that George Eliot, though a great 
writer, was not great as a novelist, according 



50 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 

to the common standard. Neither is Shake- 
speare a great dramatist according to the old 
classical standard. The novel is the most 
flexible form of literature. There is hardly 
such a thing as a legitimate and an illegiti- 
mate novel. I suppose that even " Wilhelm 
Meister," that most structureless work of 
genius, is a novel. A species of writing 
that can contain Mr. Roe's homiletic tales, 
Judge Tourgee's picturesque political bro- 
chures, Lord Beaconsfield's autobiographies 
and malice, Spielhagen's weird nightmares, 
and Erckmann - Chatrian's photographs, is 
certainly the most catholic of literary gen- 
era. But it needs no latitudinarianism to 
include George Eliot's works. To my 
mind, it is as a novelist that she is great- 
est. Ah, but her stories are not dra- 
matic, it is objected ! But who limited the 
novel to a dramatic form ? Is Charles Reade 
the normal novelist? Must there always 
be tableaux with red lights ? Fielding, the 



GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 51 

creator of the novel, was not "dramatic." 
But open " Daniel Deronda " at the incom- 
parable river scene, where Deronda rescues 
Mira, and tell me by what scene in any- 
novel it is surpassed in artistic interest? 
Read on to the meeting of the sweet lost 
little Jewess with the Meyricks; or take 
Gwendolen's confession to Deronda ; or go 
to Middlemarch, and see Dorothea whisper- 
ing confidences in the ear of Lydgate's wife. 
These scenes live ineffaceably in the memory, 
and are worth a thousand dramatic denoti- 
ments of the artificial sort. 

But what has this novelist of the first 
rank taught those who come after her about 
her art? What peculiarities of George 
Eliot's are likely to leave a strong impress 
after her? I answer, She, of all novelists, 
has attacked the profound problems of our 
existence. She has taught that the mystery 
worthy of a great artist is not the shallow 
mystery of device, but the infinite perspec- 



52 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

tive of the great, dark enigmas of human 
nature; that there is a deeper interest in 
human life seen in the modern, scientific 
daylight, than in life viewed through a mist 
of ancient and dying superstitions ; that the 
interest of human character transcends the 
interest of invented circumstances; that 
the epic story of a hero and a heroine is not 
so grand as the natural history of a com- 
munity. She, first of all, has made cross 
sections of modern life, and shown us the 
busy human hive in the light of a great 
artistic and philosophic intellect. She has 
not sought to see men in the dim haze of a 
romantic past, but to bring men into close 
vision who by difference of race, condition, 
or the lapse of time, were far away. George 
Eliot has made the typical novel of this age 
of scientific thought and growing unbelief in 
the supernatural. Knights, corsairs, bucca- 
neers, highwaymen, witches, charms, ghosts, 
miracles, second-sight, — these are the worn- 



GEORGE ELIOT AND THE NOVEL. 53 

out stage property of the past. But George 
Eliot, more than any other, has shown that 
romance, so far from dying under the influ- 
ence of the stern scepticism of our time, 
has had opened to it a new and more vigor- 
ous life. She has made the great ruthless 
forces of nature into dramatis personal, — not 
writing books of fortune, but books of fate. 
Now, the book of fate is the book of failure, 
partial or entire. The man seeks to climb 
to the sun, but at most he attains to the 
mountain-top, or, perchance, the church- 
steeple; or he falls, and breaks his neck. 
The book of fate has few " dramatic " denotfr 
ments : nevertheless it is the sublimest book 
of all, and the most interesting, if we learn 
to read it rightly. A literary primate has 
come and gone. We must revise our notion 
of the novel. It has taken on new possibili- 
ties, and received a new impress. 

EDWARD EGGLESTON. 



VI. 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 

y 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 57 



VI. 

FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 

I AM frequently struck with the difference 
between an impression as it exists in my 
mind, and the same impression as it struggles 
through the best expression that I can give 
it on paper. I have never been able to satisfy 
myself with any thing I wrote about a book 
or a person ; for there is that about books 
and persons which one feels, and very deeply 
perhaps, but which one cannot define, even 
shallowly. Poe wrote an ingenious little 
essay, in which he maintained the power of 
words ; but the time came when he dis- 
claimed his mad pride of intellectuality, and 
confessed his impotence to utter the un- 
thought-like thoughts which two words, — 



58 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

two foreign, soft dissyllables, — stirred from 
out the abysses of his heart. I desire to 
state, in what is to follow, the estimation in 
which I hold the genius of Mrs. Burnett : 
but I am not at all certain that I shall suc- 
ceed in doing so; for much that I wish to 
say will either escape me before I can grasp 
it, or will refuse to be put in words. Criti- 
cism may be an art, but it is not an exact 
science. It perceives intellectual qualities 
which it cannot classify; for, the more it 
exercises itself upon them, the more they 
defy analysis. They are elusive, shadowy, 
— emotions, not thoughts ; emanations of 
the original soul whence they proceed, that 
obey no will but their own in revealing 
themselves to the souls of others, and they 
choose their own time for that. 

There is a quality in the work of Mrs. 
Burnett which reminds me of Dickens, but 
nothing which reminds me of Dickens's man- 
ner. Roughly speaking, I should say it was 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 59 

a profound sympathy with, and an intimate 
knowledge of, what English statisticians call 
the lower classes, and American statisticians, 
the democratic masses — in other words, the 
people, the poor. I should also say that she 
was drawn to them in her early years, with- 
out knowing how, or caring why. They 
had, I think, the same attractions for her 
that they had for the young Shakespeare, who 
mastered the humors of clowns and consta- 
bles long before he mastered the emotions of 
kings, queens, and lovers ; and that they 
had for the young Dickens, who tried his 
" 'prentice han' " on every-day characters. 
The bent of her genius directed her girlish 
observation toward the miners of Lancashire, 
as it directed her maiden observation, at a 
later period, toward the mean whites of 
North Carolina. There have been great 
writers to whom the people were of much 
less account than they were to Shakespeare, 
or Scott, or Dickens. Balzac was one of 



60 ESS ATS FROM THE CRITIC. 

these, Thackeray another, and Hawthorne a 
third. Not that they did not introduce 
them in their stories, when they were needed 
for artistic purposes, but that they did not 
handle them as if they loved them — as Wal- 
ton said of the angler's worm. There may 
be a wider scope and a deeper philosophy in 
the writings of this latter class; they may 
be more metropolitan, more national, more 
cosmical even, if the phrase may be allowed ; 
but they are apt to lack a charm which is 
characteristic of provincial writing, of which 
the songs of Burns and Miss Blamire are 
good examples in verse, and the stories of 
Mr. Cable and Mrs. Burnett in prose. 

Mrs. Burnett discovers gracious secrets in 
rough and forbidding natures, — the sweet- 
ness that often underlies their bitterness, — 
the soul of goodness in things evil. She im- 
presses me as understanding her suffering 
and sinning characters as fully as Dickens 
ever understood his, — as having a more 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 61 

genuine affection for them, and as never at 
any time caricaturing them. I find no im- 
possibilities among them, no monsters of light 
and darkness, and no attempt to capture my 
sensibilities by trickery. Her pathos, when 
she is pathetic, is so natural that I am not 
ashamed of the tears in my eyes; and her 
humor, when she is humorous, is so unforced 
that I do not despise myself for laughing at 
it. I never question her domination over 
me when I am reading her books ; and when 
I close them it is not to criticise, but to 
admire. I do not mean to say that she has 
not faults, and that I do not feel them : far 
from it. There are chapters in " That Lass 
o' Lowrie's " which are tantalizing with un- 
fulfilment; they stop when they should go 
on, bringing up suddenly like balky horses. 
What is the matter here ? I ask myself. Did 
Mrs. Burnett write when she ought not to 
have written, — when the soul was in a fer- 
ment, as Keats says, the character undecided, 



62 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

the ambition thick-sighted, — or did she lop 
away her work to bring it within editorial 
requirements ? There are branches which the 
pruning-knife would seem to have trimmed, 
and gaps which only a broadaxe could have 
made. I feel these faults, I say, and feel, 
besides, a certain indecision of invention 
here and there : but I never feel that the 
story is not true to the nature it depicts; 
that it is not true to the imagination of the 
writer ; and that, with all its faults, it is not 
admirable. 

Mrs. Burnett seems to have an intuitive 
perception of character, and what belongs to 
it. If we apprehend her personages, and I 
think we do clearly, it is not because she 
describes them to us, but because they reveal 
themselves in their actions. She is not re- 
sponsible for what they say or do, or not 
more so than Thackeray would allow himself 
to be for the love between Henry Esmond 
and Lady Castlewood. " Why did you 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 63 

marry them ? " asked Mrs. Jameson (I think 
it was), whose sense of propriety was some- 
how shocked by that incident. " I did not," 
he answered : " they married themselves." 
Mrs. Burnett's characters are as veritable as 
Thackeray's ; though her range, of course, is 
much narrower than his, as her sympathies 
are more nearly allied to sentiment. The 
word "sentimental," however, which so just- 
ly describes the work of many lady novelists, 
does not apply to her work ; though the word 
" romantic," in its highest sense, does. She 
has an impassioned mind, that conceives with 
tenderness as well as strength. Only such 
a mind could have conceived Jean Lowrie, 
who, whether she follows Derrick in the 
darkness, night after night, to protect him 
from the wrath of her brutal father, or walks 
her room crooning to the child of poor fool- 
ish Liz, is alike womanly and alike noble. 
She is a glorious creature, — elemental, 
primitive, cast in the mould of the mothers 



64 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC- 

of the race, — the daughters of Job, as they 
live in the vigorous drawings of Blake, or 
the daughters of men, whom the sons of 
God saw were fair. She belongs to a sister- 
hood of heroic heroines whom the novelists 
of the period are fond of delineating (nota- 
bly Mr. Charles Reade), but she overtops 
them all in massive simplicity of character 
and thorough womanhood. Very different, 
but very lovely and touching, is that shy, sen- 
sitive, rustic little lady, Louisiana Rogers; 
and very charming and lovable is Miss O eta via 
Bassett, who seemed to have a divine right to 
embody the American girl abroad. The three 
women of whom I have spoken represent 
their sex, in a certain sense, in Mrs. Bur- 
nett's three novels, " That Lass o' Lowrie's," 
"Louisiana," and "A Fair Barbarian;" and 
represent, also, the growth and change of her 
intellect during the three years in which she 
was writing them. Other women of hers 
recur to my remembrance, though not with 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 65 

the same vividness (I may mention, in pass- 
ing, Esmeralda and Lodusky) ; and others, I 
am sure, would recur to it if I had read her 
early stories as they appeared in the maga- 
zines, or if I could bring myself to make their 
acquaintance now in certain unauthorized 
books. As I do not remember her men with 
the same distinctness as her women, I con- 
clude that her strength hitherto has lain in 
drawing the latter. I state this conclusion 
for what it is worth, as tentative, and not 
final; for I clo not accept the finality of 
genius until it has gone down into the dark 
and narrow house, nor even then when I be- 
think me of " Denis Duval " and " Hyperion." 
As I like to know something about the 
lives of the writers whom I admire, I take it 
for granted that the readers of Mrs. Burnett 
will like to know something about her life. 
I therefore proceed to tell them what I know 
about it. It is not much. She was born on 
Nov. 24, 1849, in Manchester, Eng., where 



66 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

she passed the first fifteen years of her life. 
No particulars of her childhood have reached 
me, except that, like Charlotte Bronte, she 
developed a talent for improvising stories at 
an early age, and that while at school she 
wrote poems, and began to write novels. At 
the close of our civil war her parents emi- 
grated to the United States, and settled at 
Newmarket, a small village in Eastern Ten- 
nessee, some twenty-five miles from Knox- 
ville. About a year later they removed to 
Knoxville, where, at the age of sixteen, she 
completed a story which she had planned, 
and partly written, in her thirteenth year, 
and sent it to a Boston periodical. It was 
accepted, and an early insertion promised; 
but, as the editor stated that no remuneration 
could be given for it, she reclaimed it, and 
sent it to " Godey's Lady's Book," where it 
was published, paid for, and followed by 
other stories. From Godey's she passed to 
" Peterson's Magazine," for which she wrote 



FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT. 67 

largely. The turning-point in her literary 
fortunes was " Surly Tim's Trouble," an 
English dialect story, which she sent to the 
editor of " Scribner's Monthly." It was 
published there ; and the writer, Miss Frances 
Hodgson, was invited to furnish more stories, 
which she hastened to do. About this time 
(1873) Miss Hodgson married a young Ten- 
nessee physician, and became Mrs. Burnett. 
Her next work of importance was " That 
Lass o' Lowrie's," which was published in 
" Scribner's," and which made a great sensa- 
tion, especially when it was issued in book 
form. It was reprinted in England, where 
of one edition alone about thirty thousand 
copies were sold. It was burlesqued in 
"Punch," and was dramatized and played 
with success. Mrs. Burnett's subsequent 
works are " Surly Tim and Other Stories " 
(1877), "HaworthV (1879), " Louisiana " 
(1880), and " A Fair Barbarian " (1881). 
The latest work to which she has put her 



68 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

hand is a novel of Washington life, entitled 
" Through One Administration," the mate- 
rials for which have been gathered during a 
residence of several years in the capital. 
This story is now running as a serial in "The 
Century." Just before the publication of 
the first instalment (in the November num- 
ber), Mrs. Burnett's dramatization of her 
story of " Esmeralda " was produced at the 
Madison-square Theatre. Its success is un- 
questioned ; and it is important as indicating 
the line in which her best work may be done. 

R. H. STODDARD. 



VII. 



THOREAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 

/ 



TEOBEAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 71 



VII. 

THOREAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 

Soon after the death of Miss Sophia 
Thoreau, in October, 1876, I received from 
her executor in Maine, where she died, her 
brother Henry's copy of " The Dial," in four 
volumes, which she had asked me to keep in 
memory of her and of him. Opening the 
volumes, I found in one of them a sheet of 
verses in Henry Thoreau's handwriting, and 
evidently copied out of his commonplace- 
book many years ago. Some of them have 
never been printed, and all are arranged in a 
manner that may suggest how this man of a 
great and peculiar genius regarded his own 
poems. He seldom published any except as 
parts of his prose essays, where they occur 



72 ESS ATS FROM THE CRITIC. 

either as choruses, or hymns, or as word- 
pictures to illustrate more clearly the move- 
ment of his thought. It is true he allowed 
several of his poems to appear in " The Dial," 
beginning with " Sympathy " in the first 
number, which Mr. Emerson has reprinted 
with a few more at the end of his selection 
from Thoreau's letters. But these were 
probably obtained from him by friends who 
desired to see them printed, after reading 
them in his manuscripts. I have heard it 
said that the earliest poem he showed to any 
friend was "Sic Vita," which was printed 
years afterward in " The Dial," and then in 
the "Week." This was written on a sheet 
of paper that was wrapped round a bunch of 
violets, tied loosely with a straw, and 
thrown into a lady's window. It was not 
deemed worthy of a place among those 
selected for printing in 1865 (though it had 
been read at his funeral by Mr. Alcott in 
1862), and is indeed far less striking than 



THOREAU 'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 73 

his " Inspiration," which is perhaps his 
longest poem ; but only a few extracts from 
this appeared during the author's lifetime. 
Thoreau had much skill in selecting from 
his own verses; and no doubt these frag- 
ments were the best lines in the poem, 
which consists of twenty-one stanzas. Mr. 
Emerson printed seven of these stanzas, 
omitting the less significant parts, but also 
omitting much which the author would have 
deemed essential to the full statement of his 
thought. Having received the manuscript 
from Miss Thoreau in 1863, I thought it 
right to print it entire in the Boston " Com- 
monwealth," just as it was left by the poet. 
Any differences noticed between the lines as 
there given, and as published by Mr. Emer- 
son, are caused by changes made by another 
hand. Miss Thoreau did not object to these 
slight changes ; and in regard to one short 
essay, entitled "Prayers," which she pub- 
lished in the last collection of her brother's 



74 ESSAYS FRO 31 THE CRITIC 

papers that was made by her, she fell into a 
singular error. This essay is not Henry 
Thoreau's at all, but Mr. Emerson's. It 
contains some verses of Thoreau's, — which 
in his manuscripts are entitled " Prayer," — 
but nothing else from his hand. The essay 
was originally published in " The Dial " for 
July, 1842 ; and, as the verses there appear 
in a fuller form than that given below, I as- 
sume that the sheet of verses found in my 
" Dial " was written out, in the form which 
came to me, some time before 1842, or at 
least twenty years previous to Thoreau's 
death (May 6, 1862). In this form it is 
simply a collection of rhymed sentences, 
each with its title, like epigrams ; and this, I 
conclude, was the way that Thoreau's verses 
were made. They might be, and often were, 
afterward joined together in a connected 
poem ; and sometimes the framework of this 
poem was arranged beforehand, as in the 
piece called " The Fisher's Boy," contain- 



THOREAU'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 76 

ing the line so well known and so often 
quoted, — 

" My life is like a stroll upon the beach." 

After tins long preface, let us come to the 
sheet of verses : — 

OMNIPRESENCE. 

Who equalleth the coward's haste, 
And still inspires the faintest heart; 
"Whose lofty fame is not disgraced, 
Though it assume the lowest part. 

INSPIRATION. 

If thou wilt but stand by my ear, 

When through the field thy anthem's rung, 

When that is done I will not fear 

But the same power will abet my tongue. 

PRAYER. 

Great God ! I ask thee for no meaner pelf, 
Than that I may not disappoint myself ; 
That in my conduct I may soar as high 
As I can now discern with this clear eye ; 
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith, 
And my life practise more than my tongue saith ; 



76 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

That my low conduct may not show, 
Nor my relenting lines, 
That I thy purpose did not know, 
Or overrated thy designs. 

MISSION. 

I've searched my faculties around, 

To learn why life to me was lent : 

I will attend the faintest sound, 

And then declare to man what God hath meant. 

DELAY. 

No generous action can delay 

Or thwart our higher, steadier aims ; 

But if sincere and true are they, 

It will arouse our sight, and nerve our frames. 

THE VIREO. 

Upon the lofty elm-tree sprays 
The Vireo rings the changes meet, 
During these trivial summer days, 
Striving to lift our thoughts above the street. 

MORNING. 



THOREAU 'S UNPUBLISHED POETRY. 11 

Here the sheet abruptly ends, and what 
was to be said about "Morning" we may 
never know. The quatrain describing the 
vireo singing in the elms above a Concord 
street was printed in " The Dial " for July, 
1842; another indication that these verses 
are of earlier date than that. Perhaps they 
may be found among the "verses in the long 
book," to which Thoreau refers by pencil- 
notes in his copy of " The Dial," if indeed 
the " long book " may not have been long 
ago destroyed. For during his last illness, 
in the winter of 1861-62, Henry Thoreau 
told me, in one of the conversations we had 
in his sick-room, that he had once destroyed 
many of his verses, because they did not 
please the friend (Mr. Emerson) to whose 
eye he had submitted them; but he added, 
"I am sorry now that I burned them, for 
perhaps they were better than he thought." 
I doubt not they were, and am anxious now 
that every line he left behind him should be 



78 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

printed ; for he had examined his own work 
with great care, and certainly left 

"No line which, dying, he could wish to blot." 

Why, then, should his friends erase one, 
or withhold it from publication? Even 
those which do not rise into his loftiest mood 
cast a tender light on his own life and char- 
acter, which were far more sweet and amia- 
ble than some have supposed. 

F. B. SANBOKN. 



VIII. 

EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 

/ 



EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 81 



VIII. 

EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 

Emerson on the Superlative (in "The 
Century") is the same Emerson we have 
known of old. This is perhaps one of the 
essays of his prime, as it is certainly on a 
par with any of the chapters of his later 
volumes. How he hates the superlative in 
speech, the gas and insincerity of the popu- 
lar orator ! When he went West a few 
years ago, he said the only thing he saw that 
equalled the brag was the Yosemite. This 
was the kind of superlative he liked, — the 
superlative of fact, — grandeur that beggared 
comparison. 

Yet Emerson is himself a master exag- 
gerator, the lord of extremes, holding the 



82 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

zenith and the nadir in his two hands. But 
at his best his superlative runs the other 
way, — runs to excess of truth, rather than 
to excess of form. Without adjective or 
adverb, he reaches the superlative degree 
by the sheer projectile force of his verbs 
and nouns. It is the exaggeration of quality, 
not of quantity; of essence, not of bulk. 
His sentences are a steam-chest: the force 
of expansion is there without the expansion ; 
the gas is held by an iron grip, and made 
to work. He praises a low style, moderate 
statement ; but there must be a good many 
pounds pressure to the square inch in the 
low style that suits him. The rivet-heads 
must be ready to fly, only they must not 
fly on any account. Perfect control and 
moderation though you are handling thunder- 
bolts. 

. If there is a difference between an extreme 
statement and an exaggerated statement, 
then we should say Emerson makes the 



EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 83 

extreme statement, the compact, iron-bound, 
high-pressure statement. There is never any 
admixture of a lie, not the least taint of 
insincerity, but always the plus, the pressure 
of a purpose that would make the extreme 
more available and submissive. The last 
degree, the last limit of power, he wants; 
but he wants it without striving or contor- 
tion. He cuts no fantastic tricks before 
high heaven, but he deals in plain speech 
before the Olympian dignitaries. " There 
is no god dare wrong a worm," he says 
somewhere. Speaking for Brahma, he says 
to the " meek lover of the good," " Find me, 
and turn thy back on heaven." His rhetoric 
is a search for an extreme, but for a safe and 
well-clinched statement, — for the arousing 
superlative, the superlative that freezes the 
mercury, or — boils it. He likes an under- 
statement when it is bold or stimulates by 
what it omits ; as when the village father of 
whom he speaks in this article gave as a 



84 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

toast at an agricultural fair, after the speaker 
had finished his discourse, this sentiment, 
" The orator of the day : his subject deserves 
the attention of every farmer ; " or the boy 
who on the top of the Catskill Mountains 
said to his companion, " Come up here, 
Tony, it looks pretty out-of-doors ; " and he 
likes an over-statement when it is equally 
bold, when it is a blow and not a word, a 
double shot and not a blank cartridge. In 
short, the statement must be forcible, whether 
under or over. He says the low expression 
is strong and agreeable. He means it is 
agreeable when it is strong, — when it is full 
of powder and bullet. This article on the 
Superlative is a good example of Emerson's 
Spartan exaggeration, his heroic hyperbole. 
Speaking of a person with the superlative 
temperament, he says, " If the talker lose a 
tooth, he thinks the universal thaw and dis- 
solution of things has come. Controvert 
his opinion, and he cries, ; Persecution ! ' 



EMERSON AND THE SUPERLATIVE. 85 

and reckons himself with St. Barnabas, who 
was sawed in two." He says " every favor- 
ite is not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, 
nor each unpleasing person a dark diabolical 
intriguer ; nor agonies executions, nor ecsta- 
sies our daily bread." " The secrets of 
death, judgment, or eternity are tedious 
when recurring as minute-guns. Thousands 
of people live and die who were never, on a 
single occasion, hungry or thirsty, or furious 
or terrified." But this tameness and monot- 
ony is just what our philosopher would avoid 
in speech. "The books say, 'It made my 
hair stand on end ! ' Who, in our municipal 
life, ever had such an experience ? " Yet 
the phrase, when first used, was a sample 
of the true Emersonian exaggeration. "It 
froze my blood," too, he dislikes ; yet he has 
used the phrase "the shudder of joy," and 
in his poem on the " Titmouse," he says of 
the severe cold that it " curdles the blood to 
the marble bones." In one of his earlier 



86 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

essays lie speaks of that hunger of the soul 
that could eat the solar system like ginger- 
cake. " Religion and poetry," he says, speak- 
ing of the superlative character and manners 
of the Eastern races, " are all the civilization 
of the Arab." The exaggeration of a strik- 
ing and telling antithesis is always agreeable 
to Emerson. " Dante," he says, in " Letters 
and Social Aims," " was free imagination, — 
all wings, — yet he wrote like Euclid." 
" Turnpike is one thing," he says, speaking 
of Dryden, " blue sky another." 

Emerson's exaggeration, either way, up 
or down, unlike that, say, of such a writer 
as Victor Hugo, great as the latter is, always 
strikes fire, always kindles the mind ; and we 
get a glimpse of noble manners, or feel the 
religious or else the poetic thrill. The 
heroic quality lurks in every line he writes. 
There is always the stimulus of great exam- 
ple, — of that high and undaunted attitude 
and the cheerful confronting of great odds, 



EMERSON AND TEE SUPERLATIVE. 87 

which is like the reply of the Athenian 
soldier to his Persian enemy, " Our arrows 
will darken the sun," said the latter. " Then 
we will fight in the shade," said the Greek. 

JOHN BURROUGHS. 



IX. 
A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 



A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 91 



IX. 

A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 

If there be a Tenth Muse, let her be 
known henceforth as the Muse of Spring 
Poetry ! This is the season when the ed- 
itor's waste-basket is filled to overflowing 
with odes, sonnets, and nameless other spe- 
cies of metrical composition in praise of the 
god Yertumnus. The season which puts a 
"spirit of youth in every thing" affects as 
well the laity as the recognized priesthood 
of poesy, and makes the usually discreet 
dumb spirit break forth in unadvised dithy- 
rambs. There may possibly be a singing 
contagion in the atmosphere, — a dancing 
of the air we breathe, which rhythmically 
affects our pulse, and urges us to seek a 



92 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

vocal embodiment for our "organic num- 
bers." It is certain that the most sponta- 
neous couplet, inside or outside the rhyming 
dictionary, is " spring " and " sing ; " and the 
commonest bit of song, if its keynote be 
spring, never falls into contempt or out of 
good usage. Witness : — 

April showers 

Bring forth May flowers. 

This is undoubtedly the briefest lyric ever 
composed on the subject of spring ; but, for 
any thing known to the contrary by philolo- 
gists, it may have come down to us from the 
remotest " Aryan antiquity." 

Anacreon, whose three - stringed lyre 
sounded only love, wine, and himself, makes 
an agreeable exception when, for once, he 
takes up the praise of spring. Very charm- 
ing is the picture which the old pleasure- 
lover gives us of the youthful season, as he 
beheld it: a world of flowers; the Graces 



A COMPANY OF SPEING POETS. 93 

dancing on the fresh green turf; the return 
of the cranes; the sunshiny water with its 
sailing ducks; the thrifty shoots of the 
olive ; flowers, leaves, fruit, crowding the 
same branches ; and, last of all, Bacchus and 
himself rejoicing at the prospect of a great 
grape-yield next autumn ! Anacreon was, 
without question, the chief " spring poet " 
of Teos: but he encountered no editorial 
malison, for he seems to have had little 
ambition for " rushing into print ; " on the 
contrary, being quite content with private 
recitals and the applause of his fellow bons 
vivants. But poets of the South and Orient 
could not, from the nature of the climate, 
have known all the rich surprises and deli- 
cate coquetries of the spring as they were 
known to the bards of more northern lati- 
tudes, where the changes of the year are 
more emphatically marked. Early English 
poetry, we may say, began with a melodious 
somnambulism on a May morning of the 



94 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

fourteenth century. Chaucer was the first 
" spring poet " of our tongue. There is but 
one induction to nearly all his performances, 
greeting to the springtime, and particularly 
" observance to May." There were light 
sleepers in those days, folk longing to go on 
pilgrimages, and impatient for the coming 
of daylight, like the birds themselves, as 
Chaucer describes them in the Canterbury 
Prologue : — 

" And smale fowles maken melodie 
That slepen al the night with open yhe." 

It was on a " morne of May " that Palamon 
first saw Emelie, who had risen early to do 
honor to the day, and was walking in the 
garden gathering flowers to make a " certeyn 
gerland " for her head. Again, in the story 
of the " Cuckow and the Nightingale," a 
sleepless wight wanders through a grove in 
the morning twilight, early in the month of 
May. Unluckily for the success of his love- 



A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 95 

suit, he hears the cuckoo sing before the 
nightingale ; but, in partial compensation, he 
finds a mysterious land " all white and 
green," — grass-green, " ypoudred with dai- 
sie." There he sits down among the flowers, 
and listens to the singing of the birds. 

The old dramatists are never happier than 
when they draw their comparisons from 
vernal nature. Shakespeare makes Prince 
Florizel pay a pretty compliment to Perdita, 
who is attired as the queen of the sheep- 
shearing frolic. He tells her that she seems 

"no shepherdess, but Flora 
Peering in April's front." 

In the course of the festivities, Perdita 

wishes for some "flowers o' the spring," 

suitable for her young companions, and 

names the following: — 

" Daffodils, 

That come before the swallow dares, and take 

The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, 

But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes, 

Or Cytherea's breath." 



96 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Other delicacies in this bouquet of spring 
beauties are pale primroses, bold oxslips, the 
crown imperial, lilies of all kinds, including 
the flower-de-luce. Yet another clerk calls 
the flower-roll of spring. It was inevitable 
that the memory of Lycidas should be fra- 
grant, embalmed as it was in such sweets as 
those he names. (No wonder if New Eng- 
land poets cast jealous and covetous regards 
upon the floral treasures of Old England. 
The flowers of our continent are only half- 
souled, if fragrance constitutes the soul of a 
flower.) 

We cannot go by Robin Herrick's garden, 
with its fantastic parterres, without begging 
a holiday souvenir. We will ask for violets. 
In what trim and tripping measures does he 
celebrate their beauty ! 

" Welcome, maids of honor ! 
Ye do bring 
In the Spring, 
And wait upon her." 



A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 97 

Bright and early we hear him calling 
Corinna to go a-maying. This Corinna, we 
infer, was a very phlegmatic young person to 
require so much reminding that May Day had 
come, and that her friends were impatiently 
waiting for her to join them in their quest for 
white-thorn and greens for decoration. The 
playful despatch and impatience of the verse 
are altogether irresistible. We, at least, have 
no two minds about the matter : — 

..." Wash, dress, be briefe in praying : 
Few prayers are best, when once we goe a-maying." 

Collins, who stands a long remove from 
the poets best read in Nature's traditions, 
has nevertheless one drop of pure quintes- 
sence distilled from the very atmosphere of 
spring. There is something more than mere 
elegant personification in the following 
couplet : — 

" When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, 
Returns to deck their hallowed mould ; " 



98 ESSATS FROM THE CRITIC. 

The poet, indeed, must have seen those 
dewy fingers (as we have often seen them) 
fitfully stirring among the slim, weak blades 
of the young grass, at the close of a chilly 
April day, or smoothing out the creases of 
earliest-opened leaves in the midst of a 
" sweet, un calendared spring rain." 

Never has the divinity of May been more 
divinely hymned than in Keats's ode for 
May Day, opening with an invocation to 
"Mother of Hermes, and still youthful 
Maia ! " Did we not know its authorship, 
we could readily believe it a fragment de- 
scended from some sublime-hearted Grecian 
bard, one of those who 

" died content on pleasant sward, 
Leaving great verse unto a little clan." 

This ode contains but fourteen lines, long 
and short ; but they are, as their poet wished 
them to be, " rich in the simple worship of 
a day." 



A COMPANY OF SPRING POETS. 99 

Everywhere the poetic scriptures bear 
record of the dangerous reciprocity existing 
between love and springtime, — no other 
season so fatally propitious for love-making. 
When Launcelot brings Guinevere home to 
Camelot, it is the "boyhood of the year." 
The spring has come in a "sunlit flood of 
rain ; " the tallest forest elms have already 
gathered a green mist about their tops ; the 
yellow river runs full to its grassy brim ; 
the linnet pipes, and the throstle whistles 
strong. As for Guinevere, she might pass 
for the Faerie Queen herself, having on the 
suit in fashion at the elfin court, — a grass- 
green robe with golden clasps, and light- 
green plumes held by a ring of gold, floating 
from her cap as she rides swiftly along. 
" She seemed a part of joyous spring," we are 
told; and to one who had beheld her then 
it would have been none too great a sacrifice 

" To waste his whole heart in one kiss 
Upon her perfect lips." 



100 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Alas for Launcelot and Guinevere, and for 
good King Arthur, that this journey was 
not made in the dull unelectric days of 
later summer, or under the November sky, — 
at any time save when the spirits of April 
were weaving their enchantments for idle 
pilgrims with empty hearts ! 

The spring poets ! May their race never 
die out ! They cannot be too many, too 
early, or too long-delaying. Let them not 
be put down by Philistine depreciation any- 
where. Let nothing less than a fillip on 
the ear from Apollo himself put them to 
shame. What though their notes be small 
and tame, abounding in melodious iterations 
that were not new last year, or the year 
before last ? 

" Remember, never to the hill or plain, 
Valley or wood, without her cuckoo strain, 
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed." 

EDITH M. THOMAS. 



X. 

NATURE IN LITERATURE. 



! 









NATURE IN LITERATURE. 103 



X. 

NATURE IN LITERATURE. 

Seveeal different kinds or phases of this 
thing we call Nature have at different times 
appeared in literature. For instance, there 
is the personified or deified Nature of the 
towering Greek bards, an expression of 
Nature born of wonder, fear, childish igno- 
rance, and the tyranny of personality: the 
Greek was so alive himself that he made 
every thing else alive, and so manly and 
human that he could see only these qualities 
in Nature. Or the Greek idyllic poets, 
whose nature is simple and fresh, like 
spring-water, or the open air, or the taste of 
milk or fruit or bread. The same thing is 
perhaps true in a measure of Virgil's Nature. 



104 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

In a later class of writers and artists that 
arose in Italy, Nature is steeped in the faith 
and dogmas of the Christian Church : it is a 
kind of theological Nature. 

In English literature there is the artifi- 
cial Nature of Pope and his class, — a kind 
of classic liturgy repeated from the books, 
and as dead and hollow as fossil shells. 
Earlier than that, the quaint and affected 
Nature of the Elizabethan poets; later, the 
melodramatic and wild-eyed Nature of the 
Byronic muse ; and lastly, the transmuted 
and spiritualized Nature of Wordsworth, 
which has given the prevailing tone and cast 
to most modern poetry. Thus, from a god- 
dess Nature has changed to a rustic nymph, 
a cloistered nun, a heroine of romance, be- 
sides other characters not so definite, till 
she has at last become a priestess of the soul. 
What will be the next phase is perhaps 
already indicated in the poems of Walt 
Whitman, in which Nature is regarded 



NATURE IN LITERATURE. 105 

mainly in the light of science — through 
the immense vistas opened up by astronomy 
and geology. This poet sees the earth as 
one of the orbs, and has sought to adjust 
his imagination to the modern problems 
and conditions, always taking care, however, 
to preserve an outlook into the highest 
regions. 

I was much struck with a passage in 
Whitman's last volume, " Two Rivulets," in 
which he says that he has not been afraid of 
the charge of obscurity in his poems, "be- 
cause human thought, poetry or melody, 
must have dim escapes and outlets, — must 
possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin 
to space itself, obscure to those of little or 
no imagination, but indispensable to the 
highest purposes. Poetic style, when ad- 
dressed to the soul, is less definite form, out- 
line, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, 
half-tints, and even less than half-tints." I 
know no ampler justification of a certain 



106 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

elusive quality there is in the highest poetry 
— something that refuses to be tabulated or 
explained, and that is a stumbling-block to 
many readers — than is contained in these 
sentences. 

JOHN" BURROUGHS. 



XI. 

AUSTIN DOBSON. 



AUSTIN DOBSON. 109 



XL 

AUSTIN D0BS0N. 

There is something kindred to humorous 
poetry in the warm and humid climate of 
Devonshire. All our best writers of vers- 
de-sociStS have been Devon men, except 
Prior, who had the misfortune to be born 
just over the border in Dorset. A year ago 
I made a pilgrimage to the neat little house 
in Dodbrooke, where Peter Pindar saw the 
light, and looked across the muddy creeks of 
Kingsbridge harbor to the home of Praed. 
Mr. Austin Dobson, however, though born 
at Plymouth, on the 18th of January, 1840, 
is really of French extraction. His father, 
Mr. George Clarisse Dobson, who was a 
civil engineer, came to England early in life. 



110 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 



As the name shows, he, in his turn, was of 
English descent, so that the nationalities in 
the poet are nicely confounded. At the age 
of eight or nine the latter was taken with 
his parents to Holyhead, in the island of 
Anglesea ; he was educated at Beaumaris, 
at Coventry, and finally at Strasburg, whence 
he returned at the age of sixteen with the 
intention of becoming a civil engineer. It 
was decided, however, that he should enter 
the civil service ; and accordingly, in Decem- 
ber, 1856, he received an appointment at the 
Board of Trade, where he has remained ever 
since, nearly a quarter of a century. Mr. 
Dobson's first ambition, like that of The*o- 
phile Gautier and others, was to be a painter. 
He did, as a matter of fact, design with great 
delicacy; but professional training, at the 
schools of art in South Kensington, seemed 
merely to destroy this native faculty. Strange 
to say, it was not until his twenty-fourth year 
that he began to write ; but his success at 



AUSTIN DOBS ON. Ill 

once showed this to be his true vocation. 
When Mr. Anthony Trollope started his 
magazine St. Paul's, in 1868, Mr. Dobson 
was one of the authors whom he first intro- 
duced to the public. " Une Marquise," 
printed in that serial in March of that year, 
was the earliest intimation that was given to 
the world of this new and striking talent. 
Nothing is more quiet than the life of a man 
of letters. Mr. Dobson's career has been as 
uneventful as that of most modern poets. 
In 1873, at the age of thirty-three, he first 
collected his scattered lyrics in a volume 
which he called " Vignettes in Rhyme." 
This book achieved, as it deserved, a very 
wide success. In 1874 he lost his father and 
his mother, and a brother, who died in 
Brazil. Fate often seems to concentrate her 
blow when she persuades herself to strike 
one of her favorites. When Mr. Dobson's 
next volume, "Proverbs in Porcelain," ap- 
peared, in 1877, the consensus of critical 



112 E8SAYJ3 FROM THE CRITIC. 

attention showed how much position the 
writer had gained among the judicious in 
these four years. Since then he has pub- 
lished many charming things ; and I cannot 
help fancying — not too indiscreetly, I hope — 
that we may see a third volume of his deli- 
cate work before many months are past. I 
hope it will be as welcome in America as it 
is sure to be in England. For the time 
being, the American public possesses, in the 
collection published last year by Mr. Holt, a 
great deal more of Mr. Dobson's late work 
than he has yet given to us. 

There is no one living on this side of the 
Atlantic in whom Mr. Dobson can, in my 
opinion, see a dangerous rival. He has made 
the field his own : it is, after all, but a narrow 
plot, and there is scarcely standing-room 
upon it for more than one at a time. He 
reigns where Prior and Praed have reigned 
before him, and this is no little thing to be 
able to say of any man. I do not know that 



AUSTIN DOBSON. 113 

he has ever reached the highest level of 
Prior, that true and exquisite poet, who so 
seldom was true to his own force and music. 
"The God of us Yerse Men" has a manly 
tenderness, a sort of heroic and sentimental 
levity, which surpasses all modern writing of 
the same kind; and even the author of the 
"Ballad of the Spanish Armada" has not 
quite the roar and animal spirits of the " Ode 
on the Taking of Namur." It is more fair 
and more easy to compare our latest humor- 
ous poet with Praed ; nor do I think that 
this is a comparison by which the living 
writer will suffer. The turns of Praed are 
rapid and telling, his vivacity extraordinary, 
and his rhythmical movement singularly 
bright ; but he is slight and monotonous in 
sentiment, and his muse is like a performing 
bullfinch, that goes through three tricks with 
infinite skill, and whistles one tune and a 
half as prettily as possible. Now, in Mr. 
Dobson's work we do not find these limita- 



114 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 

tions : he can do many things very well. He 
is not merely a writer of vers-de-societe : he 
is a fabulist, a dramatist in parvo, sl lyrist 
pure and simple. The only occasions upon 
which he seems to me to fail are those in 
which he attempts the romantic and heroic 
styles. " The Prayer of the Swine to Circe " 
is flawless in construction ; but it leaves us as 
cold and indifferent as the " Solomon " of 
Prior, or Gay's tragedy of "Dione." We 
are obliged to say, as Dryden said to Swift, 
" Ah ! Cousin Dobson, you will ne\eT be a 
pindaric poet ! " But in his own way, how 
perfect an artist, how exquisite a poet ! 
Whether he rattles, in ballad-style, through 
the adventures of Beau Brocade and his 
cynical crew of admirers ; whether he whis- 
pers worldly wisdom, and sighs a note of 
regret over the fish-pool with Denise and the 
princess; whether, behind a curtain in the 
chateau corridor, he giggles at the discom- 
fiture of the Abbe* Tirili, — he is always 



AUSTIN DOBSON. 115 

the same acute and refined observer, passing 
lightly over the surface of things, because 
to go deeper would wound a heart not callous 
at all, but indolent, perhaps, and touching 
the harmonious frivolities of by-gone times 
as the fingers of some maestro might lightly 
run over the keys of an old-fashioned harpsi- 
chord. He is most at home, it seems to me, 
in the first half of the eighteenth century. 
Had he been a contemporary of Hogarth, 
how singular would it have been to note the 
different point of view of two such observant 
artists ! From Mr. Dobson we should have 
had no satire of any crushing or slashing 
kind ; but what new lights on the career of 
Counsellor Silvertongue, what urbane con- 
sideration of the merits of Farinelli, what a 
disposition to throw warm color and fra- 
grance over the absurdities of Mrs. Fox 
Lane ! Since we are set upon comparisons, 
we may say that Dobson is really a sort of 
Thackeray in miniature ; a more timid, a 



116 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

more indulgent, but a not less perspicuous, 
student of society. There are many passages 
in the " Roundabout Papers " that are pitched 
in exactly the same key as such verses as 
these : — 

You are just a porcelain trifle, 

Belle Marquise I 
Just a thing of puffs and patches, 
Made for madrigals and catches, 
Not for heart-wounds, hut for scratches, 

O Marquise ! 
Just a pinky porcelain trifle, 

Belle Marquise I 
Wrought in rarest rose-Dubarry ! 
Quick at verbal point and parry, 
Clever, doubtless — but to marry, 

No, Marquise I 

There is plenty of room in the world for 
social verse when it is done in this way, by 
an artist and a gentleman ; but it is limited 
ground, after all, as we began by saying. 
Not merely is the least breath of vulgarity 



AUSTIN DOBS ON. 117 

fatal to the entire structure, which melts 
upon us in a damp horror, like Cowper's 
vitreous palace, but the interest of the flying 
buttresses and onion-domes is easily ex- 
hausted. In vers-de-societe not only is noth- 
ing tolerable short of the best, but the best 
itself should not be too often repeated. I 
think Mr. Dobson has felt that he must 
adventure, like Ulysses, upon new seas, and 
make fresh conquests. The province of fable 
is one that lies open to his invasion, and 
which has been utterly neglected of late. I 
hope he will return to those exquisite little 
dramas in octosyllabic rhyme, with which he 
opened his " Proverbs in Porcelain," and 
which so much delighted the best critics. 
These tiny pieces will never be broadly 
popular ; but Mr. Dobson has now so firm a 
place in literature that he may be content to 
address only the judicious. It would be 
fatuous to lay down any limit to the advance 
yet to be made by a poet who began to write 



118 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

rather late in life, and is still so young ; but 
it may be prophesied that he will write suc- 
cessfully just in so far as he remains true to 
the French streak in his blood, and to the 
picturesque instinct that has only just missed 
finding expression with brush or pencil. 

EDMUND W. GOSSE. 



XII. 

ALPHOXSE DAUDET. 
J 



ALP HON SE DATJDET. 121 



XII. 

ALPHONSE DAUDET. 

The distinctive quality of Alphonse Dau- 
det's genius is his passion for nature. Since 
notoriety came upon him unawares, he has 
devoted himself to the arts by which noto- 
riety is preserved, describing the flash 
manners of the town, the flaunting vices of 
metropolitan life ; and if each successive book 
of this period shows little advance upon 
its predecessors, it is because the novelist's 
heart is not in his work. He is sighing for 
the Provencal woods, for the mill where he 
sang the charms of rusticity, for the monas- 
tery of the White Fathers where he sipped 
the golden cordial, and listened to Erasmian 
stories while the mistral rushed howling 



122 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

through the belfry. He has never been very 
happy when absent from the scenes in which 
his childhood was spent. He was born at 
Nismes forty-one years ago ; and there, while 
his father was busy at a silk-manufactory, 
and his mother and aunt, strict Church- 
women both, discussed at home the mis- 
fortunes that had befallen the Papacy, the 
boy would slip away to the river, playing 
truant from school, selling his books, for the 
sake of an afternoon on the water. Often, 
in those summer days, tying his boat to the 
chain of barges which were being towed 
down the stream, he would silently watch 
the beauties of the passing landscape, his 
meditation only broken by the noise of the 
screw or the barking of a dog on the steam- 
tug. Often, caught in the reeds, he would 
gaze for hours on the river, the bridges that 
gradually grew smaller and smaller, the 
green islets that trembled on the horizon. 
Then coming home, he would every day seek 



ALPHONSE DAUDET. 123 

a new excuse for his truancy. "Mother," 
said he, on one of these occasions, " I staid 
from school because I had heard that — the 
Pope was dead." Thereupon dismay fell on 
the household. The father sat silent at the 
table, the mother wept ; the aunt alone had 
courage to discuss the event, recalling the 
days when Pius VII. had passed in post- 
chaise through her village ; and next morn- 
ing, when the boy's news was found to be 
false, the joy was so great that nobody had 
the heart to scold him. The youth of Al- 
phonse Daudet lay in scenes like these. 
They were more typical of his life than the 
stories which he wrote of " Le Petit Chose," 
and which were manifestly constructed for 
dramatic effect. 

When he came to Paris to make his way 
in literature, he was very poor, and put up 
with such company as he could get. There 
were in those days many clever men in the 
Latin Quarter ; and the young poet, wander- 



124 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

ing through the cafes, saw something of 
Rochefort and Gambetta. He also received 
an occasional invitation to the houses of 
actresses or of such literary notorieties as 
lived in the neighborhood of the Ode*cn. 
These experiences seem to have gained for 
him the reputation of an incorrigible Bohe- 
mian. No reputation could fit him less well. 
He was then, as he is now, the most sensitive 
of men. He delighted in solitary rambles, 
wherein he could study odd phases of life at 
his ease. While his comrades were singing 
in the brasserie, he would quietly make his 
way to the Seine, peep through the windows 
of the little riverside house, where a muslin 
dress hung dripping on a nail, and an old 
man sat roasting apples at a stove, viewing 
in his lap the objects which had been found 
with the muslin dress, — a thimble filled with 
sand, a purse with a sou in it, a rusty pair of 
scissors, — and turning for a moment aside 
to write in his official register, " Felicie Ra- 



ALPHONSE DAUDET. 125 

meau, milliner, seventeen years old." Or he 
would cross the bridge, and enter the work- 
men's quarter, watching the lights that 
gleamed in the low cabaret, the drunken 
orator who was bellowing at one of its 
tables, and the thin, pale wife's face that 
was pressed against the glass, trying to 
make a signal to the speaker and warn him 
that the night was spent and the children 
were starving at home. Or, again, he would 
pass before the old-fashioned houses of the 
Marais, now turned into stores and ware- 
houses, and re-clothe them with their antique 
glories of two centuries ago, when torches 
flashed, and sedan - chairs swung in the 
streets, and in the drawing-rooms there was 
a rustle of silks and clank of swords, and 
minuets were danced to the music of four 
violins, with smirkings, and trippings, and 
bowings innumerable. 

The change in Daudet's life began with 
his introduction to the Due de Morny. 



126 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Many stories are told of that first interview, 
and most of them are apocryphal. The poet 
is reported to have said, that, as the son of a 
Legitimist, he could hardly serve a Bona- 
partist. To which, according to one ac- 
count, the duke replied, "Be whatever you 
will. The empress is more Legitimist than 
you ; " or, according to another, " Have 
whatever political views you please. All I 
ask of you is that you shall cut your hair." 
His new life was very novel, and not very 
palatable, to Daudet. He had no thought in 
those days of writing sensational novels. In 
the duke's antechamber he would see the 
late King of Hanover, the King of Naples, 
Don Carlos, and Queen Isabella, and was not 
careful to study them for the purposes of 
fiction. He would hear of the scandals of 
royalty, the Prince of Orange's escapades, 
the intrigues of Russian grand dukes, and 
was not struck with the idea of using them 
to spice the history of King Christian II. of 



ALPHONSE DAUDET. 127 

Illyria. If he went to the agencies of the 
Rue Castiglione, or hunted for bric-a-brac at 
the Hotel Drouot, or carried a diplomatic 
message to Worth the dressmaker, or watched 
the gamblers at the Mirlitons or the dancers 
at Mabille, he was not in search of Mr. J. 
Tom Levis, Sephora Leemans, M. Spricht, 
the Prince d'Axel, or any of the personages 
whom he afterward introduced to fame in 
"Les Rois en Exil." These people and their 
doings he afterward recalled when he found 
that the public wanted to hear about them. 
He sickened of their company in the daj^s 
when he knew them. He obtained a long 
furlough from the duke, and fled from Paris. 
In a ruined mill of the country around Avi- 
gnon, he wrote many of those short stories 
which should be his best title to the regard 
of posterity ; and, when the strong southern 
winds came to disturb his solitude, he made 
his way to a little island off the Corsican 
coast, and took up his abode in a light-house. 



128 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

The whole day he would spend in quiet 
contemplation on the rocks, the seagulls 
whirling over his head. At night he slept 
beneath the rays of the huge lantern. It 
was the happiest period of Daudet's life. 

When the war of 1870 was drawing to a 
close, he was enrolled as a volunteer. None 
of his later work can rival the sketches 
which he then made. While Ducrot was 
fighting on the heights of Champigny, the 
battalions of the Marais were encamped at 
night in the Avenue Daumesnil, and tried to 
kill time as best they could. " The Eighth 
are giving a concert," said some one to Dau- 
det : " come and hear it." They entered a 
large booth, lighted with candles on the 
points of bayonets, and filled with men half 
asleep and half drunk. The singer, mounted 
on a platform, was shouting in a hoarse voice 
the popular song of the period, — 

" C'est la canaille 1 
C'est la canaille ! 
Eh, bien ! J'en suis." 



ALPHONSE DAUDET. 129 

He was followed by other singers, all blas- 
phemous, ribald, and obscene ; and in the 
distance the cannon joined in the refrain. 
Daudet hastened from the tent, speechless 
with indignation, and did not stop till he 
reached the Seine. The night was dark. 
Paris was sleeping in a circlet of fire. 
Dimly a gunboat could be seen trying to 
force its way up the river against the tide. 
Again and again the river swept it down, 
again and again it returned to the effort; 
and at last, as it began to conquer the 
stream, and made its way toward the scene 
of battle, a cheer burst from the crew. 
" Ah ! " cried Daudet, " how far away is the 
concert of the Eighth ! " No historian of the 
war will be able to paint it so vividly as 
Daudet painted it. His pen has the quali- 
ties of De Neuville's brush. His story of 
the "Siege of Berlin" — of the paralyzed 
veteran who thought the French would win, 
and of the imaginary campaign which his 



130 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

granddaughter planned for him — is only 
rivalled in pathos by his tale of " La Derniere 
Classe," — of the schoolmaster who, being 
told that he must never more teach French 
in Alsace, could say nothing to the boys, but 
with a heart bursting with grief, wrote in 
large letters on the slate, "Vive la France," 
and then, leaning his head against the wall, 
signed with his hand, " C'est fini. Allez- 
vous-en." 

Ten years have passed since then. To- 
day Alphonse Daudet is famous. Emile 
Zola slaps him noisily on the back, and 
claims him as a disciple of realism. Popu- 
larity may have its advantages for Daudet, 
but the familiarity of Zola is a heavy price 
to pay for it. 

P. M. POTTER. 



XIII. 
THE BOSTON CULTURE. 

K 

\ 



THE BOSTON CULTURE. 133 



xm. 

THE BOSTON CULTURE. 

A pkofoukd thinker, returning some 
years ago from a visit to Boston, where he 
had been entertained in the " Culture " 
clubs, declared that he could almost see the 
fine essence of inspiration steaming upward 
as a visible vapor from the scalps of the 
members. Whatever satire lay under this 
grotesque imagery, there can be no doubt 
that the New-England atmosphere is and 
has long been one of scholarship ; and it is 
the essential pride of Boston and its neigh- 
borhood that the best element of this at- 
mosphere finds its origin there. To be sure, 
it would be easy to name a dozen towns 
that are little Bostons, with circles as re- 



134 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 

served, as severe in their tastes, as refined, 
as the best in the metropolis ; and it would 
also be easy to show that a hundred New- 
England villages, from Lenox to Lexington, 
possess the essential quality, — -an innate 
respect for scholarship, for intellectual su- 
premacy, — which makes Boston what it 
is. 

The quality goes far back, and spreads 
widely in New-England life. It has never 
been confined to a select circle. One is 
sometimes inclined to test with a sharpened 
weapon the apparent claim of a few Boston 
families to the noble inheritance of the 
Puritan. The claim is shared with equal 
justice by many a farmer and cobbler and 
tin-peddler. Whatever fine ichor there was 
in the colonial magistrate and the scholarly 
divine is inherited in equal proportions by 
the elegant diplomat and the rustic squash- 
vender. It has been our good luck in past 
summers to be served with milk by one 



THE BOSTON CULTURE. 135 

who bears the name of an illustrious vice- 
president, to find in our wood-chopper blood 
from a stock which furnished the most elo- 
quent defender of colonial liberty, to hand 
over our horses to a man whose ancestral 
tree for many years supplied the two colo- 
nies of Massachusetts with their governors. 
The blood contains the old elements still in 
all that produces energy and sound action, 
and may in a generation find its way to as 
high station as it has ever reached. With 
such a population there is a basis for any 
degree of greatness. With such an equality 
of inheritance there is all the stimulus of a 
great past to make a great future. Where 
the blood lacks only the refinement which 
education brings, or the opportunity which 
belongs to locality, every New-England boy 
is taught to feel that he has only to pack 
his book in his bundle, and start on the 
road which leads to a foreign mission. If he 
reaches the court of England at last, he will 



136 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

find the ancestral blood in the best veins 
there. This is that which makes what we 
may call the Boston culture a pervading 
element in all New-England life. Where 
there is such a proud inheritance, such a 
stern present necessity, and such a glorious 
possibility, the conditions of a fine life are 
always present. New England has certainly 
held the mastership in energetic intellectual 
life, and to-day finds its chief competitors 
in its own transplanted stock. Its suprem- 
acy is threatened, if threatened at all, in 
the house of its children. Some years ago 
we asked a distinguished lawyer to name 
the twenty leading men of the New- York 
bar. When he had done so, we found that 
the larger half were born, and had received 
their early training, in New England. The 
same rule held good for the leading clergy- 
men — those, that is, whose names were 
known outside of their own denomination ; 
for the great journalists, orators, and public 
writers. 



THE BOSTON CULTURE. 137 

If we were asked to mention the one 
leading quality in this inherited excellence, 
we should say that it lay in the home life, 
in the spirit of reading, and independent 
thinking, the reverence for learning and the 
learned, which pervades almost every home 
there. A good book finds entrance and 
welcome in the New-England home as no- 
where else. It is respected by the father, 
reverenced by the mother, and read by the 
children. It may be a poem, or the last 
report of the Department of Agriculture ; 
it may be a literary magazine, or the Farm- 
er's Almanac, — it finds readers in the fam- 
ily, — appreciative, it may be, or merely am- 
bitious, but anyhow readers. The same may 
be sometimes true of the New- York home. 
In rural districts it is often so, but of city 
life who would dare to claim it as the rule ? 
Here the student reads, — the scholar, the 
professional man in his department ; but the 
family does very little reading. Books are 



138 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 

bought, and put upon the centre-table, but 
they are seldom opened. They are rarely 
discussed, and almost never reverenced. In 
Boston, Cambridge, Concord, Plymouth, they 
are at least read, — whether they are assimi- 
lated, or only cause intellectual dyspepsia. 
There is an audience, therefore, always pres- 
ent for the speaker or the thinker. The 
greater part of New Englanders may be 
classed as lecturers and audience. Here in 
New York there is no audience anywhere 
for the best products of intellectual activity. 
There is none visible from the platform, 
none in the parlor. The audience in Boston 
is often sophomoric and brags. It too often 
reminds us of that precept of Sir Philip 
Sidney: "If yon heare a wise sentence, or 
an apt phrase, commytt it to your memorye, 
with respect to the circumstance, when you 
shall speak it." But it presents the material 
of growth. The lecturer, the thinker, is 
generally worthy; and the silent, invisible 



THE BOSTON CULTURE. 139 

auditors in the home circle are vastly more 
than the visible ones. The " Culture " clubs 
are but a showy efflorescence, but the genu- 
ine culture is sweet and rich and modest. 
It is a real gift to New York whenever it 
feels the currents of this intellectual life. 
We have virtues of our own with which 
New England cannot equip us, — our un- 
guarded generosity, our unflinching charity, 
a wide receptivity, and richer experience in 
practical activities : but a reverence for the 
best in thought, for the inspiration of fine 
sentiment, we have not ; and as long as we 
are without this, we shall produce million- 
naires, but not high thinkers, — Vanderbilts, 
but not Emersons. We shall have bustle, 
but not fine recreation, and shall be known 
abroad for the immensity of our railroad 
system, rather than for the soundness and 
elevation of our mental life. The shrewd 
observer who praised Newport because it 
was equally removed from the virtues of 



140 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Boston and the vices of New York, might 
have constructed from the two extremes a 
possible metropolis nearer to the millennial 
city even than Newport. Let us hope that 
we see the beginning of such a city in the 
fresh impulse given here of late in art, in 
music, in architecture, in science, and in 
some departments of literature. 

J. H. MOUSE. 



XIV. 

THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 
/ 



THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 143 



XIV. 

THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 

[The following brief essay on the life and genius of the 
late Mr. Sidney Lanier was read at a memorial gathering 
in Hopkins Hall, Baltimore, on the evening of Saturday, 
Oct. 22, 1881. The meeting was not only a tribute to the 
memory of Mr. Lanier, but was designed to initiate a 
movement to raise money for the support of his widow 
and the education of his children. President Gilman, 
of Johns Hopkins University (in which Mr. Lanier served 
as lecturer on English literature), presided, and to him 
Mr. Stedman's letter was addressed. It was courteously 
withheld from publication in any report of the meeting, 
in order that it might be printed in " The Critic." ] 

My dear Sir, — I have expressed already 
my regret that I cannot be present at your 
assembly commemorative of the poet and 
gentle scholar, Sidney Lanier. But I gladly 
avail myself of your permission to write a 



144 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

few words in recognition of his original 
genius, and in expression of the sorrow with 
which his fellows lament him, as one gone 
before his time. 

Certainly all who care for whatsoever 
things are pure, lovely, and of good report, 
must be deeply concerned in the record and 
ending of Lanier's earthly pilgrimage ; con- 
cerned no less, if ever they chanced to meet 
him, in the mingled softness and strength of 
his nature, the loyalty with which he sang 
his song, pursued his researches, and took 
the failures and successes of his consecrated 
life. For, if there ever was a pilgrim who 
bore a vow, or a life consecrate to an ideal, 
such a votary was this poet-artist, and so 
manifestly ordered was his too brief life. 

You will speak to one another of his brave 
spirit, of the illness and trials that handi- 
capped him, and of the cheerful industry 
with which he went through daily tasks, and 
yet so often escaped to the region of poetry 



THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 145 

and art. That he had the graceful and prac- 
tical talent that can adapt itself to use, and 
give pleasure to the simplest minds, was 
proved by his admirable books for the young, 
and the professional labors fresh in your rec- 
ollection. But in the mould of Lanier, as 
in that of every real poet, the imaginative 
qualities and the sense of beauty governed 
and gave tone to all other senses and motive 
powers. He was first of all a poet and artist, 
and of a refined and novel order. 

No man, in fact, displayed more clearly 
the poetic and artistic temperaments in their 
extreme conjunction. It may be said that 
they impeded, rather than hastened, his 
power of adequate expression. He strove 
to create a new language for their utter- 
ance, and a method of his own. To reach 
the effects toward which his subtle instincts 
guided him, he required a prolonged lifetime 
of experiment and discovery; and to him how 
short a life was given, — and that how full 



146 ESS ATS FROM THE CRITIC. 

of impediment ! He had scarcely sounded 
the key-note of his overture, when the bow 
fell from his hand; and beyond all this he 
meant to compose, not an air or a tune, but 
a symphony, — one involving all harmonic 
resources, and combinations before unknown. 
I find that I am involuntarily using the 
diction of music to express the purpose of 
his verse ; and this fact alone has a bearing 
upon what he did, and what he did not do, 
as an American poet. What seemed affecta- 
tion in him was his veritable nature, which 
differed from, and went beyond, or outside, 
that of other men. He gave us now and 
then some lyric, wandering or regular, that 
was marked by sufficient beauty, pathos, 
weir dn ess, to show what he might have 
accomplished, had he been content to sing 
spontaneously — as very great poets have 
sung — without analyzing his processes till 
the song was done. But Lanier was a musi- 
cian, and still heard in his soul " the music 



THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 147 

of wondrous melodies." He had, too, the 
constructive mind of the artist who compre- 
hends the laws of form and tone. How 
logical was his exposition of the mathematics 
of beauty, is seen in that unique work, " The 
Science of English Verse." 

Now, it is a question whether, art being so 
long and time so fleeting, a poet should con- 
sider too anxiously the rationale of his song. 
Again, he strove to demonstrate in his verse 
the absolute co-relations of music and poetry 
— and seemed at times to forget that rhythm 
is but one component of poetry, albeit one 
most essential. While music is one of the 
poet's servitors, and must ever be compelled 
to his use, there still remains that boundary 
of Lessing's between the liberties of the two 
arts, though herein less sharply defined than 
between those of poetry and painting. The 
rhythm alone of Lanier's verse often had a 
meaning to himself that others found it hard 
to understand. Of this he was conscious. 



148 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITTC. 

In a letter to me, he said that one reason for 
his writing " The Science of English Verse " 
was, that he had some poems which he hoped 
soon to print, but which " he could not hope 
to get understood, generally, without edu- 
cating their audience." To this he added 
that the task was "inexpressibly irksome" 
to him, and that he " never could have found 
courage to endure it save for the fact that in 
all directions the poetic art was suffering 
from the shameful circumstance that criti- 
cism was without a scientific basis for even 
the most elementary of its judgments." 

If, in dwelling upon the science of his art, 
he hampered the exercise of it, he was none 
the less a man of imagination, of ideality; 
none the less, at first sight, in bearing, fea- 
tures, conversation, a poet and lover of the 
beautiful. His name is added to the names 
of those whose haunting strain — 

" Ends incomplete, while through the starry night 
The ear still waits for what it did not tell." 



THE LATE SIDNEY LANIER. 149 

Yet the sense of incompleteness and of 
regret for his broken life is tempered by 
the remembrance that the most suggestive 
careers of poets have not always been those 
which were fully rounded, but often of those 
whose voices reach us from early stages of 
the march which it was not given them long 
to continue. 

EDMUND 0. STEDMAK. 
Daniel C. G-iuoan, LL.D., Baltimore, Md. 



XV. 

ENGLISH SOCIETY AND "ENDYMION.' 

/ 






ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 153 



XV. 

ENGLISH SOCIETY AND "ENDYMION." 

A classic name, as little suggestive of 
the work that bears it as was Mr. Long- 
fellow's " Hyperion " of the accompanying 
narrative. Books nowadays are often named 
like ships, with a view to what will sound 
and look well, and with no possible reference 
to what they are or to what they carry. 
This work of Lord Beaconsfleld's will hardly 
add more to his reputation than will Mr. 
Tennyson's last volume to his half-century 
of fame. A dull book, with a rambling, 
insignificant story, it has yet, from one point 
of view, a certain importance and interest 
for the student of men and manners. It 
unfolds some of the secrets of that dazzling 



154 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

London life whose features, imperfectly 
translated through various mediums, have 
always had for most polite Americans a 
great attraction. 

This book does or should do much to 
dispel the illusions with which distance and 
imagination are wont to invest the "high 
life " of Great Britain. Its author does not 
give us a single glimpse of the noblesse 
oblige as we understand it. The society 
which his facile pen depicts is at once shal- 
low and silly. Even the tradition of the 
blue blood which, Heaven knows why, so 
touches our transatlantic reverence, gives 
way before his treatment. In his narrative, 
men of the humblest rank rise to posts of 
high honor and influence. The butler of 
Endymion's father, married to his mother's 
maid, makes such a transition from humble 
to high life, while the sister of the female 
attendant just mentioned weds a noble lord, 
and becomes a leader of fashion. A London 



ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 155 

tailor gives entertainments at which a peer 
of the realm finds it delightful to be present, 
and in time attains to a baronetcy and a 
seat in the House of Commons. Why not ? 
some may ask; and we will say in reply, 
that, according to American views of life, 
all this is natural enough. There is nothing 
repugnant to our theories in such changes 
of outward fortune. What should shock 
the worshipper of rank is the discovery 
which Lord Beaconsfield allows us to make, 
that human nature, in its intrinsic qualities 
and genuine manifestations, is much the 
same in Belgravia as elsewhere. Stripped 
of their exceptional wealth and of the pres- 
tige of their position, the men and women 
he depicts are rather more commonplace and 
uninteresting than the average of our own 
acquaintance. They have nothing whatever 
upon which to found a claim of superiority 
in character, talent, or true breeding. Love, 
ambition, anger, avarice, are the same with 



156 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

them as with the civilized world in general. 
Among them, as among ns, the parvenu 
whose object in life has been to climb from 
the base to the top of the social ladder is 
the true bigot of rank and distiuction. 
Those born in recognized position are famil- 
iar with its conditions, which they usually 
do not exaggerate. Those who "with a 
great sum (of money or of effort) obtain 
this freedom " often manifest a fantastic 
devotion to that which has cost them so 
much. The historical value of Lord Bea- 
consfield's book is far beyond the interest 
of his story. He speaks as an eye-witness 
of political changes and complications which 
occurred during the two reigns preceding 
the long-continued dominion of the present 
sovereign. He has inevitably known some- 
thing of the internal history of events which 
the sexagenarian of to-day will remember 
as having been matters of comment and of 
interest in his own early days. He has 



ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 157 

seen Bismarck and Lonis Napoleon at a 
time in which the world troubled itself 
little about them. He represents them as 
meeting on friendly terms at the great en- 
tertainments of fashionable houses during 
the London season. They are very likely 
so to have met, and the suggestion calls 
grimly to mind the denoument of their rela- 
tions which the future held in store. 

The circle to which Lord Beaconsfield's 
talents and personal attractions gave him 
access in early manhood was indeed an 
exceptionally brilliant one. London society 
might be proud when it could boast of such 
men as S} T dney Smith, Samuel Rogers, 
Monckton Milnes, Edwin Landseer, Dickens, 
and Thackeray. These luminaries were 
matched by an equally brilliant set of 
women, among whom we may name the 
Duchess of Sutherland and her beautiful 
daughters, Lady Blessington (in her re- 
stricted but privileged coterie), and the 



158 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

Sheridan sisters, of whom the Hon. Mrs. 
Norton was pre-eminent in beauty and 
talent. More than one American still lives 
who has grateful remembrance of those 
palmy days, to whose high pleasures a good 
introduction or an exceptional reputation 
sometimes admitted a transatlantic cousin. 
To know a little even of what Lord Beacons- 
field must have known of some of these 
persons is a boon of interest, even if his 
presentment of them must involve some 
disappointment. The noble lord does not 
describe this exceptional time, these excep- 
tional people at their best. His story is like 
a game of chess, in which lord and lady, 
prelate, commoner, and men of letters, are 
but the pieces which his skill manoeuvres 
on the checkered board. It is a devil's 
game too, in which the victory rests with 
ambition, freighted with talent, and guided 
by cool judgment. The glimpse which he 
tries to give us of the world of letters in 



ENGLISH SOCIETY AND " ENDYMION." 159 

the persons of one or two of its prominent 
citizens is scarcely worthy of one who mnst 
have himself enjoyed the freedom of the 
intellectual guild. The two great satirists 
of the age, Dickens and Thackeray, are 
spoken of in the novel under the names 
of Gushy and St. Barbe ; and the portraiture 
of the latter is so unpleasing that we are 
glad to hear of the former only as hated and 
decried by his literary rival. The charac- 
terizations of Baron Rothschild and Cardinal 
Manning, under the pseudonymes of Mr. 
Neufchatel and Nigel Penrucldock, are more 
happily hit off. The one has the calm poise 
and kindliness of the man who has achieved 
transcendent fortune by fair means. The 
other starts in life with that mistaking of 
the symbol for the substance which makes 
him first the slave, then the instrument, of 
spiritual tyranny. The family of the rich 
manufacturer, Job Thornberry, is also well 
painted. The sound sense and genuine 



160 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

pluck of the farmer's son, who becomes not 
only a rich man, but also a political power, 
the snobbish aristocracy of his son, the easy 
surrender of his wife to the blandishments 
of the Romanist archbishop, — all of these 
points are simply and strongly given. 

The attitude of the writer in relation to 
the society which he describes is perhaps 
the most singular feature of the book. No 
depth of his own contrasts with the shal- 
lowness of his characters. Their likings 
and dislikings, acts, prejudices, and under- 
takings, are all painted in the flattest relief. 
We find in his picture no background of 
affection, philanthropy, or steadfast belief. 
All is glittering surface, from which there 
is no retreat. Thackeray's " Vanity Fair " 
seems to us the only parallel of " Endymion," 
for the dreary moral waste which it unfolds 
to us. Pride, ambition, cunning, vanity, 
make up the feast of life, to which the 
apples of Sodom furnish the only appropriate 



ENGLISH SOCIETY AND "ENDY3II0N." 161 

dessert. From such a kingdom an empire 
of India would be a relief. The greatest 
point of interest for Americans is the con- 
trast which this life of shams affords to the 
realities of freedom, energy, and affection 
which form the staple of our national life. 
And this interests us most because it is this 
very quintessence of frivolity which seems 
to attract the golden youth of our own 
country. Our literary men and women 
once looked to England for the seal and 
sanction of their merit. We have now 
developed a literature of our own by which 
England is glad to profit. Heaven forbid 
that we should look to the England of Lord 
Beaconsfield for our standard of morals and 
manners ! He does not depict our mother 
country, for motherhood there is none in 
his portraiture. A different England some 
of us know, — cheery, hospitable, rich in 
family life, earnest in philanthropy, reserved 
but steadfast in reform and progress. Give 






162 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

us the England of Wordsworth, Tennyson, 
and Browning ; the England of Shakespeare, 
Bacon, and Milton. She lives in an un- 
rivalled literature, in thrifty colonies, in a 
robust and well-dowered daughter. To her 
we may look with love and veneration. Of 
her we may learn in the future as we have 
learned in the past. Honor to those who 
can show us this truly noble England! 
Honor to those who study her great . lessons, 
and cherish her grand traditions ! And as 
for the fribble of the Old World and the 
fribble of the New, it is perhaps well enough 
to let them pair off harmlessly together. 

JULIA WARD HOWE. 



XVI. 

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 

/ 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM CF CHRIST. 165 



XVI. 

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 

Theee are two natural processes in re- 
spect of all great personalities that attract 
the interest and win the honor and rever- 
ence of the race, — the process by which they 
are magnified and exalted into demi-gods and 
mythic divinities ; and the process by which, 
in ages of critical inquisitiveness, they are 
reduced to their original historic proportions. 
The two processes are by no means necessa- 
rily contradictory. The mythic greatness, 
the glamour and imaginative exaltation, of 
the human spirits that have wrought upon 
the souls of men with transcendent power, is 
just as truly a part of the history of hu- 
manity, and a deserved tribute to their mag- 



166 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

nitude as persons of vast original force, as if 
it were biographically true in its details. 
And the later necessity which the critical or 
strictly historic spirit falls under, of discover- 
ing just what the literal facts were touching 
the person who is thus idealized, does little to 
disturb the place the object of this inquiry 
holds in the reverence of men. We have 
seen a general resurrection of the heroes and 
martyrs and poets and patriots of the past, 
called up in the last half-century by the 
spirit of modern historic criticism, to pass 
under the review of a strictly rational in- 
quest, and to undergo not the last, but a 
later judgment, from the beneficiaries of 
their genius, or their doings and sayings. 
An intense curiosity has animated the mod- 
ern world to see the kings, the patriots, the 
poets, the saints and heroes of the past, as 
men, and not merely as splendid apparitions ; 
to bring them not down to, but within, the 
immediate range of human sympathies; to 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 167 

know them as they really lived and moved, 
and get as near to their private hearts and 
experiences as the utmost pains could bring 
the closest and most microscopic investiga- 
tors. We have, perhaps, lost some beloved 
personalities under a process which has 
undraped figures that seemed warm with 
human blood, to discover beneath only an 
idea that had passed into human form, and 
taken a name — like that of Tell — where only 
a group of national feelings really existed. 
But, as a rule, the greatness and glory of 
historic names have not suffered from mod- 
ern criticism, even when it has revealed 
much that was private and human on the 
feebler side. What they have seemed to 
lose by familiarity they have regained by 
sympathy and reality. The more human 
they have been made, the more interesting. 
Washington is himself growing in estimation 
from the critical development of his human 
personality; for it is not only supernatural 



168 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

beings to whom the world assigns a double 
nature, — the nature that belongs to their 
public, and the nature that belongs to their 
private character. 

The multiplication of works on the strictly 
human nature of Jesus is one of the most 
marked features of the times. The Chris- 
tian world for eighteen centuries was wholly 
occupied with the supernatural side of the 
founder of Christianity. His humanity was 
deemed of comparatively little importance, 
except as a sign of his humiliation, and a 
ground of doctrine. That the Supreme 
Being should have condescended to incar- 
nate himself in flesh and blood, and take 
upon him the nature of man, was indeed a 
matter of profound theological interest, and 
naturally became the foundation-stone of a 
vast dogmatic system which still rules the 
creeds and the religious imagination of the 
Church and the world. But the life of 
Jesus from a human point of view necessa- 



% 

HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. 169 

rily became denaturalized by the hypothesis, 
however well founded, of his being really a 
god, shrouded in a human form. Human he 
must be considered on one side, to make 
effectual the very dogma of his divine conde- 
scension, and to render him capable of expi- 
ating the sins of the race, whose lineage and 
nature he shared, and whom he came to save 
by his self-sacrifice. But this humanity of 
Christ's was, after all, if metaphysically real, 
practically fictitious. He was a man, and 
human only so far as a God of omniscient 
and omnipotent wisdom and power could be 
a man; and he could only be a man as a 
king could be a beggar if he put on his rags 
and assumed his filth and poverty, and went 
about asking alms. All the while the king 
keeps his crown, and knows his royalty, and 
must feel the unreality of his destitution; 
and it is at least very difficult to conceive 
how the man in Jesus could be a real man, 
while the God in him was a real God. The 



170 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 

difficulties of this union made a large part of 
the dogmatic speculation and controversy of 
the early Church. But the double nature 
got itself at last established as a funda- 
mental dogma, — a mystery and riddle of 
hopeless obscurity, but none the less an arti- 
cle of faith, fruitful of the most intricate and 
puzzling, but also of the most awful and 
decisive convictions. Under its influence 
the man Jesus for eighteen centuries wholly 
disappeared. The Christ came forward, 
wearing indeed his human habiliments, and 
carrying in his divine person all the dog- 
matic fruits of his crucified humanity, but 
really only a god; nay, God himself, and 
overwhelmingly interesting as God, while 
his proper humanity continued only as a foil, 
or means of setting off more effectively and 
dramatically his divinity. 

But in the last half-century the Church has 
brought forth children in all its branches, to 
whom the study of Jesus, not so much as the 



HISTORICAL CRITICISM OF CHRIST. Ill 

Christ, but in himself as a genuine man, — a 
man to himself, to his first disciples, to his 
mother and brethren, to his fellow Galileans, 
and to the Jewish people, — has become a 
matter of the same interest it seems to have 
been to his original biographers, the Synop- 
tics. How easy it was to lose this interest 
in contemplating the Christ, and not Jesus, 
appears in the extraordinary departure made 
in the Fourth Gospel from the simplicity of 
the three Synoptics; and still more in that 
departure, once for all, which Paul in his 
epistles made from the biographical or purely 
historic and actual Jesus of Nazareth, to set 
up the Christ, the divine Saviour, or deific 
Messiah, as the sole object of contemplation, 
faith, and confidence, for his disciples. Paul, 
who must have known fully the earthly 
history of Jesus, hardly thinks it worth while 
to dwell on any part of it, — not his birth, or 
his works of mercy or love, or his human 
graces, — but only on his death and resurrec- 



172 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

tion, and elevation to heavenly powers, and 
his speedy return in the clouds of heaven to 
set up his divine kingdom amid his risen 
saints in the earth. Is it any wonder that 
the Church for eighteen centuries has mainly 
followed in the track it so early took under 
the great authority of Paul, in neglecting 
the strictly human side of the founder of the 
faith? 

H. W. BELLOWS. 



XVII. 
WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 



WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 175 



XVII. 

WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 1 

Virtually, but not actually, this is the 
first time that Mr. Whitman has issued his 
poems through a publishing-house instead of 
at his private cost. The two volumes called 
" Leaves of Grass " and " The Two Rivu- 
lets," which he had printed and himself sold 
at Camden, N.J., are now issued in one, 
under the former title, without special accre- 
tions of new work, but not without a good 
deal of re-arrangement in the sequence of 
the poems. Pieces that were evidently writ- 
ten later, and intended to be eventually put 
under "Leaves of Grass," now find their 

1 Leaves of Grass. By "Walt Whitman. Boston: 
James R. Osgood & Co. 



176 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 

place ; some that apparently did well enough 
where they were have been shifted to other 
departments. On the whole, however, the 
changes have been in the direction of greater 
clearness as regards their relation to the sub- 
titles. It is not apparent, however, that the 
new book is greatly superior to the old in 
tj^pography, although undeniably the fault 
of the privately printed volumes, a variation 
in types used, is no longer met with. The 
margins are narrower, and the look of the 
page more commonplace. The famous poem 
called " Walt Whitman " is now the " Song 
of Myself." It still maintains : — 

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable ; 
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. 

It still has the portrait of Whitman when 
younger, standing in a loose flannel shirt and 
slouched hat, with one hand on his hip, the 
other in his pocket. " Eidolons " has been 
taken from the second volume, and placed, 



WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." Ill 

for good reasons that the reader may not be 
ready to understand, among the first pieces 
gathered under the sub-title " Inscriptions." 
It ends with the " Songs of Parting," under 
which the last is " So Long," a title that a 
foreigner, and perhaps an American, might 
easily consider quite as untranslatable as 
Mr. Whitman proclaims himself to be. The 
motive for the publication seems to be to 
take advantage of that wider popularity 
which is coming somewhat late in life to him 
whom his admirers like to call "the good 
gray poet." 

One great anomaly of Whitman's case has 
been, that while he is an aggressive cham- 
pion of democracy and of the working-man, 
in a broad sense of the term working-man, 
his admirers have been almost exclusively of 
a class the farthest possibly removed from 
that which labors for daily bread by manual 
work. Whitman has always been truly cavi- 
are to the multitude. It was only those who 



178 ESSAYS FROM TEE CRITIC. 

knew much of poetry, and loved it greatly, 
who penetrated the singular shell of his 
verses, and rejoiced in the rich, pulpy kernel. 
Even with connoisseurs, Whitman has been 
somewhat of an acquired taste ; and it has 
always been amusing to note the readiness 
with which persons who would not or could 
not read him, raised a cry of affectation 
against those who did. This phenomenon is 
too well known in other departments of taste 
to need further remark ; but it may be added 
that Mr. Whitman has both gained by it and 
lost. He has gained a vigorousness of sup- 
port on the part of his admirers that probably 
more than out-balances the acrid attacks of 
those who consider his work synonymous 
with all that is vicious in poetical technique, 
and wicked from the point of morals. As 
to the latter, it must be confessed, that, ac- 
cording to present standards of social rela- 
tions, the doctrines taught by Whitman 
might readily be construed, by the over-hasty 



WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 179 

or unscrupulous, into excuses for foul living ; 
for such persons do not look below the sur- 
face, nor can they grasp the whole idea of 
Whitman's treatment of love. However 
fervid his expressions may be, and however 
scornful he is of the miserable hypocrisies 
that fetter but also protect the evilly dis- 
posed, it is plain that the idea he has at 
heart is that universal love which leaves no 
room for wickedness, because it leaves no 
room for doing or saying unkind, unchari- 
table, unjust things to his fellow-man. With 
an exuberance of thought that would supply 
the mental outfit of ten ordinary poets, and 
with a rush of words that is by no means 
reckless, but intensely and grandly labored, 
Whitman hurls his view of the world at the 
heads of his readers with a vigor and bold- 
ness that takes away one's breath. This 
century is getting noted among centuries 
for singular departures in art and literature. 
Among them all, there is none bolder or 



180 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC 

more original than that of Whitman. Per- 
haps Poe in his own line might be cited as 
an equal. It is strange, and yet it is not 
strange, that he should have waited so long 
for recognition, and that by many thousands 
of people of no little culture his claims to 
being a poet at all are either frankly scouted 
or else held in abeyance. Literature here 
has remarkably held aloof from the vital 
thoughts and hopes of the country. It 
seems as if the very crudity of the struggle 
here drove people into a petty dilettante 
atmosphere of prettiness in art and literature 
as an escape from the dust and cinders of 
daily life. Hence our national love for 
" slicked up " pictures, for instance, by 
which it is often claimed in Europe that 
promising geniuses in painting, there, have 
been ruined for higher work. Hence our 
patronage of poets that have all the polish 
of a cymbal, but all a cymbal's dry note and 
hollowness. Hence, at one time, our admi- 



WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 181 

ration for orators that were ornate to the 
verge of inanity. Into this hot-house air of 
literature Walt Whitman bounded with the 
vigor and suppleness of a clown at a funeral. 
Dire were the grimaces of the mourners in 
high places, and dire are their grimaces still. 
There were plenty of criticisms to make, 
even after one had finished crying " Oh ! " at 
the frank sensuality, the unbelievable naked- 
ness of Walt. Every thing that decent folk 
covered up, Walt exhibited, and boasted of 
exhibiting ! He was proud of his nakedness 
and sensuality. He cried, " Look here, you 
pampered rogues of literature, what are you 
squirming about, when you know, and every- 
body knows, that things are just like this, 
always have been, always will be ? " But it 
must be remembered that this was what he 
wrote, and that he did it with a plan, and 
by order from his genius. It has never been 
heard of him that he was disgusting in talk, 
or vile in private life; while it has been 



182 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

known that poets celebrated for the lofty- 
tone of their morality, for the strictness of 
their Christianity, the purity of their cabinet 
hymns, can condescend in private life to 
wallow in all that is base. That is the other 
great anomaly of Whitman. He rhapsodizes 
of things seldom seen in print with the en- 
thusiasm of a surgeon enamoured of the won- 
derful mechanism of the body. But he does 
not soil his conversation with lewdness. If 
evil is in him, it shows only in his book. 

Whitman's strength and Whitman's weak- 
ness lie in his lack of taste. As a mere 
external sign, look at his privately printed 
volumes. For a printer and type-setter, re- 
porter and editor, they do not show taste in 
the selection and arrangement of the type. 
A cardinal sin in the eyes of most critics is 
the use of French, Spanish, and American- 
Spanish words, which are scattered here and 
there, as if Whitman had picked them up, 
sometimes slightly incorrectly, from wander- 



WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 183 

ing minstrels, Cubans, or fugitives from one 
of Walker's raids. He shows crudely the 
American way of incorporating into the 
language a handy or a high-sounding word 
without elaborate examination of its original 
meaning, just as we absorb the different 
nationalities that crowd over from Europe. 
His thought and his mode of expression 
are immense, often flat, very often monoto- 
nous, like our great sprawling cities with 
their endless scattering of suburbs. Yet 
when one gets the " hang " of it, there is a 
colossal grandeur in conception and execu- 
tion that must finally convince whoever will 
be patient enough to look for it. His 
rhythm, so much burlesqued, is all of a part 
with the man and his ideas. It is apparently 
confused ; really most carefully schemed ; 
certainly to a high degree origin al. It has 
what to the present writer is the finest thing 
in the music of Wagner, — a great booming 
movement or undertone, like the noise of 



184 ESSAYS FROM THE CRITIC. 

heavy surf. His crowded adjectives are like 
the mediaeval writers of Irish, those extraor- 
dinary poets who sang the old Irish heroes 
and their own contemporaries, the chiefs of 
their clans. No Irishman of to-day has 
written a nobler lament for Ireland, or a 
more hopeful, or a more truthful, than has 
Walt Whitman. Yet it is not said that he 
has Irish blood. Nor is there to be found in 
our literature another original piece of prose 
so valuable to future historians as his notes 
on the war. Nor is there a poet of the war- 
time extant who has so struck the note of 
that day of conflict as Whitman has in 
"Drum Taps." He makes the flesh creep. 
His verses are like the march of the long 
lines of volunteers, and then again like the 
bugles of distant cavalry. But these are 
parts of him. As he stands complete in 
" Leaves of Grass," in spite of all the things 
that regard for the decencies of drawing- 
rooms and families may wish away, he cer- 



WHITMAN'S "LEAVES OF GRASS." 185 

tainly represents, as no other writer in the 
world, the struggling, blundering, sound- 
hearted, somewhat coarse, but still magnifi- 
cent, vanguard of Western civilization that 
is encamped in the United States of America. 
He avoids the cultured few. He wants to 
represent, and does in his own strange way 
represent, the lower middle stratum of hu- 
manity. But, so far, it is not evident that 
his chosen constituency cares for, or has even 
recognized him. Wide readers are beginning 
to guess his proportions. 



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